This book is devoted to the basic mathematical properties of solutions to
boundary integral equations and presents a systematic approach to the
variational methods for the boundary integral equations arising in elasticity,
fluid mechanics, and acoustic scattering theory. It may also serve as the
mathematical foundation of the boundary element methods. The latter have
recently become extremely popular and efficient computational tools in
applications. The authors are well known for their fundamental work on boundary
integral equations and related topics. This book is a major scholarly
contribution to the modern theory of boundary integral equations and should be
accessible and useful to a large community of mathematical analysts,