Book excerpt: This Ergebnisse volume is aimed at a wide readership of mathematicians and physicists, graduate students and professionals. The main thrust of the book is to show how algebraic geometry, Lie theory and Painlevé analysis can be used to explicitly solve integrable differential equations and construct the algebraic tori on which they linearize; at the same time, it is, for the student, a playing ground to applying algebraic geometry and Lie theory. The book is meant to be reasonably self-contained and presents numerous examples. The latter appear throughout the text to illustrate the ideas, and make up the core of the last part of the book. The first part of the book contains the basic tools from Lie groups, algebraic and differential geometry to understand the main topic.