Leyton's Process Grammar has been applied by scientists and engineers in many disciplines including medical diagnosis, geology, computer-aided design, meteorology, biological anatomy, neuroscience, chemical engineering, etc. This book demonstrates the following:

The Process Grammar invents several entirely new concepts in biological morphology and manufacturing design, and shows that these concepts are fundamentally important.

The Process Grammar has process-inference rules that give, to morphological transitions, powerful new "causal explanations."

Remarkably, the book gives a profound "unification" of "biological morphology" and "vehicle design."

The book invents over 30 new CAD operations that realize fundamentally important functions of a product.

A crucial fact is that the Process Grammar is an example of the laws in Leyton's Generative Theory of Shape which give the ability to recover the "design intents "for which the shape features of a CAD model were created. The book demonstrates that the Process Grammar recovers important design intents in biological morphology and manufacturing design. In large-scale manufacturing systems, the recovery of design intents is important for solving the interoperability problem and product lifecycle management.

This book is one of a series of books in Springer that elaborates Leyton's Generative Theory of Shape.

In this book, the author develops a generative theory of shape with two properties fundamental to intelligence: maximizing transfer of structure, and maximizing recoverability of generative operations. The theory is applied in considerable detail to CAD, perception, and robotics. A significant aspect of this book is the development of an object-oriented theory of geometry. This includes a group-theoretic formulation of object-oriented inheritance. In particular, a class of groups is developed called "unfolding groups", which define any complex shape as unfolded from a maximally collapsed version of itself called an "alignment kernel". The group is decomposed into levels corresponding to the inheritance hierarchy within the complex object. This achieves one of the main goals of the theory - the conversion of complexity into understandability. The advantages of the theory are demonstrated with lengthy studies of robot manipulators, perceptual organization, constructive solid geometry, assembly planning, architectural CAD, and mechanical CAD/CAM.

Michael Leyton has developed new foundations for geometry in which shape is equivalent to memory storage. A principal argument of these foundations is that artworks are maximal memory stores. The theory of geometry is developed from Leyton's fundamental laws of memory storage, and this book shows that these laws determine the structure of paintings. Furthermore, the book demonstrates that the emotion expressed by a painting is actually the memory extracted by the laws. Therefore, the laws of memory storage allow the systematic and rigorous mapping not only of the compositional structure of a painting, but also of its emotional expression. The argument is supported by detailed analyses of paintings by Picasso, Raphael, Cezanne, Gauguin, Modigliani, Ingres, De Kooning, Memling, Balthus and Holbein.