A regional meeting of the London Mathematical Society, followed by a workshop
on ‘Analysis and Stochastics of Growth Processes’, was held at the University
of Bath on 11–15 September 2006. The aim of these events was to bring
together analysts and probabilists working on the mathematical description of
growth phenomena, with models based on the physics of individual particles discussed
alongside models based on the continuum description of large collections of
particles.
Convinced by positive feedback from the participants that this exercise in
interdisciplinary exchange was worthwhile, we invited the speakers of the meeting
and the workshop to contribute to this volume with an article in the same
spirit. We hope that the resulting collection will help bridge the gap between
researchers studying phenomena of the same type with different approaches. The
meeting and the workshop were funded by the London Mathematical Society and
the Bath Institute for Complex Systems, whose generous support is gratefully
acknowledged.