We have decided to discontinue the publication of preprints on our preprint server end of 2024. The publication culture within mathematics has changed so much due to the rise of repositories such as ArXiV (www.arxiv.org) that we are encouraging all institute members to make their preprints available there. An institute's repository in its previous form is, therefore, unnecessary. The preprints published to date will remain available here, but we will not add any new preprints here.
This survey wants to give a short introduction to the transversality problem in symplectic field theory and motivate to approach it using the new Fredholm theory by Hofer, Wysocki and Zehnder. With this it should serve as a lead-in to the user's guide to polyfolds, which is appearing soon and the result of a working group organized by J. Fish, R. Golovko and the author at MSRI Berkeley in fall 2009.