The main goal of this article is to review some recent
applications of operator-splitting methods.
We will show that these methods are well-suited to the numerical
solution of outstanding problems from various areas in Mechanics,
Physics and Differential Geometry, such as the direct numerical
simulation of particulate flow, free boundary problems with surface
tension for incompressible viscous fluids, and the elliptic real
Monge--Ampère equation. The results of numerical experiments
will illustrate the capabilities of these methods.