The Lezioni Lincee on Topics of Polymer Dynamics were delivered by Professor Pierre Gilles de Gennes at the Politecnico di Milano in December 1986 to an audience of faculty members and graduate students.

The subject of polymer dynamics has been expanding at a very rapid pace in the last few decades and Professor de Gennes has been an active contributor to the field. In particular, several new theoretical ideas have appeared, one of their purposes being to connect different phenomena into a unified frame.

Rather than attempting to give a complete discussion of the whole subject, Professor de Gennes has concentrated on some special topics.

Chapter 1 (which consists of the first and the second lecture as originally delivered in Milan) contains a discussion of some general aspects of polymer chain dynamics. After a brief general illustration of the subject, the motion of isolated chains in a dilute solution is analyzed. Global and local deformation modes are discussed, with reference both to uncharged chains and to flexible polyelectrolytes. Attention is then focused on polymer melts; their viscoelastic behavior is seen in the light of the concept of chain ‘reptation’. Chemical kinetics in entangled media is then taken into consideration, with several examples. Some other aspects of polymer dynamics are also analyzed, including crystallization and the behavior of ramified chains.

The subject of Chapter 2 (originally the fourth lecture) is the conformation of a protein chain around a receptor site, a problem of great importance in molecular biophysics.