1. Introduction

Polymer science is now a thriving multidisciplinary scientific community. It is composed of scientists, engineers, technologists and industrialists from a very wide range of academic communities: mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, chemical engineering, materials science and engineering, mechanical engineering, plastics engineering, dentistry, textile engineering, and many more. What unites this disparate group is a belief that the material world contains substances that can best be understood in terms of extended macromolecular structures: polymers. While the word polymer simply means “many repeat units”, and while many actual substances that are not molecular in nature have been referred to as polymers, the present treatise will focus on the growth in understanding of substances that are genuinely macromolecular.