Biological flows

Biomechanics can be traced back at least to the sixteenth century, but its rapid growth came in the second half of the twentieth century. The field drew physical scientists and engineers with difficult problems in the life sciences, and it offered life scientists a way to make their work more fundamental through collaboration. Its maturity is shown by the creation of a World Committee for Biomechanics and by the strong turnout at the first World Congress, in San Diego in 1990, and the second, in Amsterdam in 1994.

The second congress featured more than 1,350 scientific papers presented in symposia, oral sessions and poster sessions. Producing full edited proceedings of that many contributions was not practical, and most of the papers were expected to appear in the field's leading journals. Instead, this volume honours the work of the plenary lecturers, the tutorial presenters and the keynote speakers of the various symposia, and makes their findings available to readers who could not attend. The editors also felt that the field needed a review of its current state.