This book is intended to serve as an introduction to the multidisciplinary field of disorderly surface growth. It is a reasonably short book, and is not designed to review all of the recent work in this rapidly developing area. Rather, we have attempted to provide an introduction that is sufficiently thorough that much of the current literature can be profitably read. This literature spans many disciplines, ranging from applied mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology on the one hand to materials science and petroleum engineering on the other.

It is envisaged that this book may be of use in courses in many different departments, so no specific background on the part of the reader is assumed. Part 1 of the book is an introduction that should bring readers from a variety of disciplines to a common place of discourse. Thus the first chapter illustrates the range of natural examples of disorderly surface growth, and mentions without any use of mathematics a few of the key new ideas that serve to provide some insights. The second chapter introduces the scaling approach to describing surface growth, by focusing on a single tractable model system – ballistic deposition. No prior exposure to scaling concepts is assumed. The third and last chapter of Part 1 introduces the key fractal concepts of self-similarity and self-affinity.

Part 2 comprises five chapters devoted to the general topic of nonequilibrium roughening.