Welcome to Issue 18 of SHAPE Journal.
In this issue of SHAPE Journal we carry on with the next instalments of both Interrupted Development & Bursts of Creation, and The Demise of Formalism.

There has been something of a lull in the publishing of normal issues over the last couple of months, but this has been caused by the involvement of a whole flood of Specials, including two very important ones on The Big Bang and The Origin of Life on Earth, so these have suspended normal service, which is now being resumed. These Specials are now ready and will be published in the very near future.

But, the single wholly new Paper in this issue is yet another extraction from the book A Structure of Diagrams. This is a paper that gets to the heart of that book, for it shows an interesting type of diagrammatic form, which is that which assists in the solution of problems. We are used to diagrams that are designed to explain – a means of communication between an author and his readers. But the diagrams included in this paper are for a researcher communicating with as yet unsolved content, and facilitating new ways of seeing and solving difficult areas. This example was concerned with tessellations of re-entrant figures in Three Dimensions, and will, no doubt, delight any mathematicians among our readers.

Also, it is perhaps a good time to mention a paper, which will commence in Issue 19.
It is entitled Diagrams of Emergence, and shows some of the series of images that were developed to explain Emergences leading up to the recent Special. So, as a precursor, these will be put up on our Blog, along with a Review called Differences Among Colleagues, which criticises the whole group of contributors to a Horizon Programme on BBC TV in 2010. The offering was called Before the Big Bang, but in spite of this supposedly inclusive title, it turned out not only to be entirely inappropriate, but also delivered by a group of mathematicians purporting to be “cosmologists”. The next SHAPE Special, will also tackle the Big Bang under the title The Origin. These are as usual available on our Blog at :-

http://www.e-journal.org.uk/shape/blog

Our new policy of regularly producing Reviews on our Blog is continuing with the pieces mentioned above. So this will indeed continue to happen at regular intervals from now on.

Read and enjoy, and if moved to do so, react! Send us your views for publication in the Journal. We look forward to such reactions as they inform us of what our readers require. Left to ourselves we will not necessarily produce from our prodigious store of work in the best possible order.

Jim Schofield
APR 2011