A broad variety of research topics emerged during the past sixty years from the institute's global theme 'oscillations and waves'. Some of these topics are addressed in this book in which topical review articles by former and present members of the institute are collected. The subjects covered vary from speech and hearing research to flow control and active control systems, from bubble oscillations to cavitation structures, from ordering phenomena in liquids and one-dimensional solids to complex dynamics of chaotic nonlinear systems, from laser speckle metrology to ring laser gyroscopes, from biophysics to medical applications in ophthalmology as well as extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy.