This book treats the theory of global attractors, a recent development in the theory of partial differential equations, in a way that also includes many traditional elements of the subject. It gives a quick but directed introduction to some fundamental concepts, and by the end proceeds to current research problems.

This book develops the theory of global attractors for a class of parabolic PDEs that includes reaction-diffusion equations and the Navier-Stokes equations, two examples that are treated in detail. A lengthy chapter on Sobolev spaces provides the framework that allows a rigorous treatment of existence and uniqueness of solutions for both linear time-independent problems (Poisson's equation) and the nonlinear evolution equations which generate the infinite-dimensional dynamical systemss of the title. Attention then switches to the global attractor, a finite-dimensional subset of the infinite-dimensional phase space which determines the asymptotic dynamics. In particular, the concluding chapters investigate in what sense the dynamics restricted to the attractor are themselves "finite-dimensional." The book is intended as a didactic text for first year graduates, and assumes only a basic knowledge of Banach and Hilbert spaces, and a working understanding of the Lebesgue integral.