Growth and Form: Nonlinear Aspects

Growth and Fonn is the title of a famous book written by D’ Arcy Thomson at the beginning of the century. It relates a large number of problems of shapes of bodies either in the physical world or the biological realm. Keywords in this field are shapes, spirals, growth law, gravity field, surface tension, scaling laws, diffusion and mechanical efficiency. This field is the source of a considerable amount of work, even today, and this conference was a place where some of this work was discussed. Except for a few contributions with biophysical inspiration, the main part of the conference was devoted to physical problems related to growth and fonn and especially to the problem of the motion of interfaces under various nonequilibrium conditions. Even with this restriction, this field is huge, from the more applied area (combustion, metallurgy) to the more fundamental (singularities in the complex plane, solvability conditions). One day, at dinner time, in a restaurant with a good view of the corsica sea, W. Kurz from Lausanne told us about teleferique cables and the kind of material which was necessary to build them. Considering the important abyss between this kind of concept and for instance, the huge fonnalism involving Green functions used to find operating points for dendritic growth, we immediatelty had the giggles for five minutes. This large domain was the occasion to confront many scientists from different areas (physicists, applied mathematicians, specialists of combustion, metallurgists and geologists).