Preface (Special issue on Analysis of non-equilibrium evolution problems: selected topics in material and life sciences)

The more one dives into the structural details of material or life sciences problems, the more sophisticated and specific the mathematical tools needed to address these problems become. The challenges are generally twofold: On the one hand one wishes to find accurate descriptions of the microscale, while on the other hand, having in view certain microscale dynamics (close to micro phase transitions), one wishes to capture a basic understanding over much larger scales. In both cases one aims at well-posed PDE models in the sense of Hadamard, which are not only computable numerically but also verifiable against experiments