The twistor theory of equations of KdV type: I

This article is the first of two concerned with the development of the theory of equations of KdV type from the point of view of twistor theory and the self-dual Yang-Mills equations. A hierarchy on the self-dual Yang-Mills equations is introduced and it is shown that a certain reduction of this hierarchy is equivalent to then-generalized KdV-hierarchy. It also emerges that each flow of then-KdV hierarchy is a reduction of the self-dual Yang-Mills equations with gauge group SL _n . It is further shown that solutions of the self-dual Yang-Mills hierarchy and their reductions arise via a generalized Ward transform from holomorphic vector bundles over a twistor space. Explicit examples of such bundles are given and the Ward transform is implemented to yield a large class of explicit solutions of then-KdV equations. It is also shown that the construction of Segal and Wilson of solutions of then-KdV equations from loop groups is contained in our approach as an ansatz for the construction of a class of holomorphic bundles on twistor space.A summary of the results of the second part of this work appears in the Introduction.Most of this work was done while Darby Fellow of Mathematics at Lincoln College, Oxford