Bilinear Integrable Systems: From Classical to Quantum, Continuous to Discrete

We gathered here in a lovely and quaint fishing port, Marciana Marina on the island of Elba, to celebrate one of the pioneers of integrable systems, Hirota Sensei, and this at the occasion of his seventieth birthday. Trained as a physicist in his home university Kyushu University, Professor Hirota earned his PhD in ?61 at Northwestern University with Professor Siegert in the field of ?Quantum Statistical mechanics?. He wrote a widely appreciated Doctoral dissertation on ?Functional Integral representation of the grand partition function?. We are also celebrating another birthday, namely the birth, some thirty years ago, of multisoliton solutions for the KdV equation, the representation of in-tegrable equations as bilinear equation and Hirota?s D-operation. All this happened in the period 1971 through 1974.