%0 Journal Article %T The Toda hierarchy and the KdV hierarchy %A D. Gieseker %J Mathematics %D 1995 %I arXiv %R 10.1007/BF02101288 %X The Toda hierarchy of size $N$ is well known to be analogous to the KdV hierarchy at $N$ goes to infinity. This paper shows that given $f$ a periodic function, there is a canonical way of defining the initial data for the Toda lattice equations so that the evolution of this data under the Toda lattice hierarchy looks asymptotically like the evolution of $f$ under the KdV hierarchy. Further, the conserved quantities of $f$ and those of the Toda hierarchy match. %U http://arxiv.org/abs/alg-geom/9509006v1