Book excerpt: In celebration of Haim Brezis's 60th birthday, a conference was held at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, with a program testifying to Brezis's wide-ranging influence on nonlinear analysis and partial differential equations. The articles in this volume are primarily from that conference. They present a rare view of the state of the art of many aspects of nonlinear PDEs, as well as describe new directions that are being opened up in this field. The articles, written by mathematicians at the center of current developments, provide somewhat more personal views of the important developments and challenges.