Plateau's Problems and their Modern Ramifications

Today's special session within the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society is held in honor of Joseph-Antoine-Ferdinand Plateau whose magnum opus, Statique experimentale et theorique des liquides soumis aux seules forces moleculaires, was published a century ago, in 1873. This book, in the main unifying the contents of a series of eleven long scientific papers which appeared during the period 1843-1869, may be described as the condensation of Plateau's experimental observations and measurements regarding the phenomena caused by capillary forces. It contains a complete historical account and a summary of theoretical insights as well. The book's impact on its contemporaries and on subsequent generations cannot be exaggerated. His reports were studied in many quarters. His experiments were repeated by many scientists, among them Faraday, Brewster and Boys. In present days Plateau's work has become rather lost in obscurity. Surface chemists who, with a few notable exceptions, now often shun the use of mathematical approaches, are generally content with a brief reference to Plateau in their text books, and it is really in mathematics where his name lives on.