Book excerpt: This book describes state-of-the-art advances and applications of the unified transform and its relation to the boundary element method. The authors present the solution of boundary value problems from several different perspectives, in particular the type of problems modeled by partial differential equations (PDEs). They discuss recent applications of the unified transform to the analysis and numerical modeling of boundary value problems for linear and integrable nonlinear PDEs and the closely related boundary element method, a well-established numerical approach for solving linear elliptic PDEs. The text is divided into three parts. Part I contains new theoretical results on linear and nonlinear evolutionary and elliptic problems. New explicit solution representations for several classes of boundary value problems are constructed and rigorously analyzed. Part II is a detailed overview of variational formulations for elliptic problems. It places the unified transform approach in a classic context alongside the boundary element method and stresses its novelty. Part III presents recent numerical applications based on the boundary element method and on the unified transform.