9350227 Goldstein As a Presidential Faculty Fellow award, this proposal consists of two parts. 1) The teaching plan involves the development of interdisciplinary undergraduate and graduate courses in nonlinear dynamics and chaos, in hydrodynamics and pattern formation and in the physics of biological and colloidal systems. 2) The research plan involves seemingly diverse classes of problems ranging from pattern formation to topological transitions to protein folding with particular emphasis on their dynamical aspects. The PI proposes to look for unifying concepts such as the role of variational principles and conservation laws and for an understanding of how energetics, kinetics and topological and geometrical constraints are linked, in describing the dynamics of patterns and shapes. %%% The PI proposes to start several undergraduate and graduate classes at Princeton in the general area of chaos and unstable dynamics, of pattern formation in liquid systems and of the physics of biological systems. His research plan is to look for general unifying principles governing the dynamics of how things - be they coils of DNA or vortices in superconductors or fingers of one liquid displacing another - change shape. His interest lies at the heart of the competition between the driving force (energetics and kinetics) to change shape and the constraints that geometry puts upon that change. ***
