Special issue on Deformation of Dense Heterogeneous Matter

This special issue is dedicated to Professor H. Eugene Stanley. In fact it consists of a selection of contributions to the conference held in Messina on 6-8 December,2001 to honour his 60th birthday.

It is hard to believe that Professor H. Eugene Stanley would be 60 years old. Judging from his scienti.c production, the number of books he has written and co-authored and from the number of students and collaborators,one would think that he has been working already for 100 years. On the other hand,judging from his energy,y outhfulness, creativity and enthusiasm,one would think he is 40. Gene Stanley or just Gene,as he is known worldwide,is a very unique person in our scienti.c community. He was a kind of Wunderkind in his twenties. At that time,he made a big splash through the exact solution of the spherical model and his work with Kaplan on the two-dimensional XY and Heisenberg models,and he was the youngest speaker at the Statphys Conference in Kyoto. At that age he also wrote his most famous book, Introduction to Phase Transition and Critical Phenomena,whic h is not only the most popular in this .eld but a masterpiece in pedagogical simplicity combined with scienti.c depth. All of us have used this textbook during our life.

While critical phenomena have accompanied Gene throughout his life,from the very beginning he showed a very strong desire to enter new .elds,and in particular those related to medicine and biology. All along at MIT he was actively engaged in medical research and over the years he has made beautiful contributions to the sequencing of DNA strands, the heartbeat,the branching of the lung,Alzheimer's disease and explained why the stomach does not digest itself. After Gene joined Boston University and founded his famous Polymer Center,his laboratory became the most active and most visited one of his department and posed a serious competition to Harvard and MIT. While in the beginning polymers,exp erimentally and theoretically,w ere the main focus of this Center,yielding important results on gelation and the fractal nature of polymers,so on the center became a hotbed of creativity in modelisation and interdisciplinary research. In 1977,Gene proposed the structure of percolation clusters which is accepted today: singly connected "red" bonds linking multiply connected blobs. This work gave a new geometrical understanding to phase transition and much insight into the transport on random media. A particular emotional close relationship Gene kept with water. This important .uid mobilised his fantasy for over 25 years,and during this period he discovered most unbelievable e.ects,as for instance a critical point hidden in the metastable region of water's phase diagram. Collaborating with experimentalists,he still keeps verifying his predictions.

The intense scienti.c activity,the large number of international visitors and of students of the highest capacity coming from all continents made and still makes the Polymer Center one of the most stimulating places to visit in the US. Out of the 72 PhD students and 90 PostDocs that Gene advised,man y have by now become famous professors. The scienti.c production was huge. With over 800 journal publications containing 102 Physical Review Letters and 34 articles in Nature,Gene is not only one of the most proli.c living physicists on earth,but also one of the most cited ones. In addition,he co-authored seminal books about fractal surfaces with Lazlo Barabasi and on econophysics with Rosario Nunzio Mantegna. In fact another of his favorite subjects,on which he also published with his son Michael, are .nancial markets.

Last but not least,Gene is an excellent teacher,hea vily engaged also in pregraduate and college studies. At early times he already engaged high-school students to university research during their summer vacations which .nally led,for instance,Robin Selinger to become a professor in physics. He has been selected the Massachusetts Professor of the year, executed a programme for Childrens' Television Workshop and co-authored several college level textbooks. He has received generous funding from education agencies. The National Science Foundation awarded him the distinguished teacher's scholar prize in 2001. He also got many other awards including 4 honorary doctorates.

On top of all these academic merits,Gene is a wonderful human being,constan tly engaged in helping the people around him,giving support to young and old and housing many guests with such a warm hospitality that is di.cult to match. He has friends in nearly every country of the world who admire him and are grateful to him. One could say without exaggeration that he is internationally the most popular statistical physicist in the world. When we learned in disbelief that he is going to turn 60,his friends strove for the privilege to host a meeting in his honour,and since the number of his friends is so great and so widespread,.nally four di.erent conferences were organised in di.erent places and with di.erent people to honour his birthday which is,to our knowledge,unique in the history of physics.

The largest of these conferences with over 200 participants was the one organised in Messina. Re.ecting the broad spectrum of Gene's interest,man y subjects were dealt with in this meeting. The present issue of European Physial Journal E is just concentrating on contributions in the area of soft condensed matter. In fact we have chosen here only 14 selected contributions from the areas of glasses,gran ular matter and gels.

Hans J. Herrmann

ICA 1,Univ ersity of Stuttgart

Francesco Mallamace

University of Messina