The question of Historic Titles in International Law has been much discussed in recent years. In particular, it was an issue of some im portance in several international arbitrations, such as the Gulf of Fon seca case, decided by the Central American Court of Justice; the Island of Palmas case, decided by Judge Huber as sole arbitrator, under the auspices of the Permanent Court of Arbitration; the case concerning the Legal Status rif Eastern Greenland before the Permanent Court of International Justice; and, more recently still, the cases concerning Fisheries (United Kingdom v. Norway); Minquiers and Ecrehos Islets (U nited Kingdom v. France); Certain Frontier Land (Belgium v. N ether lands); and Temple rif Preah Vihear (Cambodia v. Thailand), before the International Court of Justice. Historic Titles are probably also a re levant factor in a number of territorial disputes that have not yet been submitted to arbitration or judicial settlement. The recent controversies over the proper breadth for the territorial sea and the exclusive fishing limits of coastal States have brought to the fore new aspects of the problem."

This book develops the thesis that structure and function in a variety of condensed systems - from the atomic assemblies in inorganic frameworks and organic molecules, through molecular self-assemblies to proteins - can be unified when curvature and surface geometry are taken together with molecular shape and forces. An astonishing variety of synthetic and biological assemblies can be accurately modelled and understood in terms of hyperbolic surfaces, whose richness and beauty are only now being revealed by applied mathematicians, physicists, chemists and crystallographers. These surfaces, often close to periodic minimal surfaces, weave and twist through space, carving out interconnected labyrinths whose range of topologies and symmetries challenge the imaginative powers.

The book offers an overview of these structures and structural transformations, convincingly demonstrating their ubiquity in covalent frameworks from zeolites used for cracking oil and pollution control to enzymes and structural proteins, thermotropic and lyotropic bicontinuous mesophases formed by surfactants, detergents and lipids, synthetic block copolymer and protein networks, as well as biological cell assemblies, from muscles to membranes in prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells. The relation between structure and function is analysed in terms of the previously neglected hidden variables of curvature and topology. Thus, the catalytic activity of zeolites and enzymes, the superior material properties of interpenetrating networks in microstructured polymer composites, the transport requirements in cells, the transmission of nerve signals and the folding of DNA can be more easily understood in the light of this.

The text is liberally sprinkled with figures and colour plates, making it accessible to both the beginning graduate student and researchers in condensed matter physics and chemistry, mineralogists, crystallographers and biologists.