Patterns in Permutations and Words

There has been considerable interest recently in the subject of patterns in permutations and words, a new branch of combinatorics with its roots in the works of Rotem, Rogers, and Knuth in the 1970s. Consideration of the patterns in question has been extremely interesting from the combinatorial point of view, and it has proved to be a useful language in a variety of seemingly unrelated problems, including the theory of Kazhdan--Lusztig polynomials, singularities of Schubert varieties, interval orders, Chebyshev polynomials, models in statistical mechanics, and various sorting algorithms, incl