the Hamilton–Jacobi method, in which solutions to Hamilton's equations are sought by first finding a complete solution of the associated Hamilton–Jacobi equation. In classical terminology, this is described as determining a transformation to a canonical set of coordinates consisting of completely ignorable variables; i.e., those in which there is no dependence of the Hamiltonian on a complete set of canonical "position" coordinates, and hence the corresponding canonically conjugate momenta are all conserved quantities. In the case of compact energy level sets, this is the first step towards determining the action-angle variables. In the general theory of partial differential equations of Hamilton–Jacobi type, a complete solution (i.e. one that depends on n independent constants of integration, where n is the dimension of the configuration space), exists in very general cases, but only in the local sense. Therefore, the existence of a complete solution of the Hamilton–Jacobi equation is by no means a characterization of complete integrability in the Liouville sense. Most cases that can be "explicitly integrated" involve a complete separation of variables, in which the separation constants provide the complete set of integration constants that are required. Only when these constants can be reinterpreted, within the full phase space setting, as the values of a complete set of Poisson commuting functions restricted to the leaves of a Lagrangian foliation, can the system be regarded as completely integrable in the Liouville sense. Solitons and inverse spectral methods A resurgence of interest in classical integrable systems came with the discovery, in the late 1960s, that solitons, which are strongly stable, localized solutions of partial differential equations like the Korteweg–de Vries equation (which describes 1-dimensional non-dissipative fluid dynamics in shallow basins), could be understood by viewing these equations as infinite-dimensional integrable Hamiltonian systems. Their study leads to a very fruitful approach for "integrating" such systems, the inverse scattering transform and more general inverse spectral methods (often reducible to Riemann–Hilbert problems), which generalize local linear methods like Fourier analysis to nonlocal linearization, through the solution of associated integral equations. The basic idea of this method is to introduce a linear operator that is determined by the position in phase space and which evolves under the dynamics of the system in question in such a way that its "spectrum" (in a suitably generalized sense) is invariant under the evolution, cf. Lax pair. This provides, in certain cases, enough invariants, or "integrals of motion" to make