It has been 160 years since the first recorded observation of a solitary water wave in a canal, which British scientist John Scott Russell saw while riding on horseback. Since then, many beautiful and applicable results of the physics and mathematics of solitary waves have appeared. Among them, several are noteworthy: the single soliton solution to the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation (Korteweg and de Vries, 1895), the dnoidal solution (solitary wave packet) to the KdV equation (Gurevich and Pitaevskii, 1973), and analytical and numerical solutions to the perturbed and forced KdV (PKdV and fKdV) equations (Newell, 1985; Wu, 1987; Shen, 1993). Continuous emergence of fresh results in recent years suggests that it is still a brisk field.

Zheng, Q., and R.D. Susanto. 2007. Review of Solitary Waves in Fluids, edited by R.H.J. Grimshaw. Oceanography 20(4):175–177, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2007.24.

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