This IMA Volume in Mathematics and its Applications TOPOLOGY AND GEOMETRY IN POLYMER SCIENCE is based on the proceedings of a very successful one-week workshop with the same title. This workshop was an integral part of the 1995-1996 IMA program on "Mathematical Methods in Materials Science." We would like to thank Stuart G. Whittington, De Witt Sumners, and Timothy Lodge for their excellent work as organizers of the meeting and for editing the proceedings. We also take this opportunity to thank the National Science Foun­ dation (NSF), the Army Research Office (ARO) and the Office of Naval Research (ONR), whose financial support made the workshop possible. A vner Friedman Robert Gulliver v PREFACE This book is the product of a workshop on Topology and Geometry of Polymers, held at the IMA in June 1996. The workshop brought together topologists, combinatorialists, theoretical physicists and polymer scientists, who share an interest in characterizing and predicting the microscopic en­ tanglement properties of polymers, and their effect on macroscopic physical properties.

1. Entanglement Complexity of Polymers.- Entanglements of polymers.- Entropic exponents of knotted lattice polygons.- The torsion of three-dimensional random walk.- 2. Knot Energies.- Self-repelling knots and local energy minima.- Properties of knot energies.- Energy and thickness of knots.- On distortion and thickness of knots.- 3. Random Linking.- Percolation of linked circles.- Minimal links in the cubic lattice.- 4. Effect of Geometrical Constraints.- Knots in graphs in subsets of Z3.- Topological entanglement complexity of polymer chains in confined geometries.- 5. Surfaces and Vesicles.- Survey of self-avoiding random surfaces on cubic lattices: Issues, controversies, and results.- Computational methods in random surface simulation.- A model of lattice vesicles.