This work was initiated in the summer of 1985 while all of the authors were at the Center of Nonlinear Studies of the Los Alamos National Laboratory; it was then continued and polished while the authors were at Indiana Univer­ sity, at the University of Paris-Sud (Orsay), and again at Los Alamos in 1986 and 1987. Our aim was to present a direct geometric approach in the theory of inertial manifolds (global analogs of the unstable-center manifolds) for dissipative partial differential equations. This approach, based on Cauchy integral mani­ folds for which the solutions of the partial differential equations are the generating characteristic curves, has the advantage that it provides a sound basis for numerical Galerkin schemes obtained by approximating the inertial manifold. The work is self-contained and the prerequisites are at the level of a graduate student. The theoretical part of the work is developed in Chapters 2-14, while in Chapters 15-19 we apply the theory to several remarkable partial differ­ ential equations.