The 60th birthday of Peter Lax was celebrated at Berkeley by a conference entitled Wave Motion: theory, application and computation held at the mathematical Sciences Research Institute, June 9-12, 1986. Peter Lax has made profound and essential contributions to the topics described by the title of the conference, and has also contributed in important ways to many other mathematical subjects, and as a result this conference volume dedicated to him includes research work on a variety of topics, not all clearly related to its title.