Thirty years of studies of integrable reductions of Einstein's field equations

More than thirty years passed since the first discoveries of various aspects of integrability of the symmetry reduced vacuum Einstein equations and electrovacuum Einstein - Maxwell equations were made and gave rise to constructions of powerful solution generating methods for these equations. In the subsequent papers, the inverse scattering approach and soliton generating techniques, B\"acklund and symmetry transformations, formulations of auxiliary Riemann-Hilbert or homogeneous Hilbert problems and various linear integral equation methods have been developed in detail and found different interesting applications. Recently many efforts of different authors were aimed at finding of generalizations of these solution generating methods to various (symmetry reduced) gravity, string gravity and supergravity models in four and higher dimensions. However, in some cases it occurred that even after the integrability of a system was evidenced, some difficulties arise which do not allow the authors to develop some effective methods for constructing of solutions. The present survey includes some remarks concerning the history of discoveries of some of the well known solution generating methods for these equations, brief descriptions of various approaches and their scopes as well as some comments concerning the possible difficulties of generalizations of various approaches to more complicate gravity models and possible ways for avoiding these difficulties.
Comment: 22 pages, based on the opening remarks given at the MGAT1 parallel session of the Twelfth Marcel Grossmann Meeting (Paris, July 12 - 18, 2009)