This volume comprises the proceedings of a NATO Advanced Study In stitute held at Geilo, Norway, April 6 -16 1999. The ASI was the fifteenth in a series held biannually on topics related to cooperative phenomena and phase transitions, in this case applied to soft condensed matter and its configurations, dynamics and functionality. It addressed the current experimental and theoretical knowledge of the physical properties of soft condensed matter such as polymers, gels, complex fluids, colloids, granular materials and biomaterials. The main purpose of the lectures was to obtain basic...

This book comprises the Proceedings of a NATO Advanced Study Institute on Mu1ticritica1 Phenomena held in Geilo, Norway, between 10-21 April 1983. This school was the seventh to be held in Gei10, on various aspects of phase transitions. In spite of its apparently restrictive title the school was planned as a forum for the discus sion of phase transitions and instabilities in systems, with competing interactions and competing order parameters. Thus, in addition to the canonical multicritical points, subjects were diverse as critical phenomena in random magnetic systems and routes to chaos were...