Inertial manifolds and finite-dimensional reduction for dissipative PDEs

These notes are devoted to the problem of finite-dimensional reduction for parabolic PDEs. We give a detailed exposition of the classical theory of inertial manifolds as well as various attempts to generalize it based on the so-called Mane projection theorems. The recent counterexamples which show that the underlying dynamics may be in a sense infinite-dimensional if the spectral gap condition is violated as well as the discussion on the most important open problems are also included.