A traditional way to honor distinguished scientists is to combine collections of papers solicited from friendly colleagues into dedicatory volumes. To honor our friend and colleague Mort Gurtin on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday, we followed a surer path to produce a work of intrinsic and lasting scientific value: We collected pa pers that we deemed seminal in the field of evolving phase interfaces in solids, a field to which Mort Gurtin himself has made fundamental contributions. Our failure for lack of space to include in this volume every paper of major significance is mitigated by the ma gisterial introduction prepared by Eliot Fried, which assesses the contributions of nu merous works. We hope that this collection will prove useful and stimulating to both researchers and students in this exciting field. August 1998 JohnM. Ball David Kinderlehrer Paulo Podio-Guidugli Marshall Slemrod Contents Introduction: Fifty Years of Research on Evolving Phase Interfaces By Eliot Fried. 0 •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 0 ••••• 1 I. Papers on Materials Science Surface Tension as a Motivation for Sintering By C. Herring 33 Two-Dimensional Motion of Idealized Grain Boundaries By W. W. Mullins 0 ••••••••••• 0 ••••••••••••••••••• 70 Morphological. Stability of a Particle Growing by Diffusion or Heat Flow By w. w. Mullins and R. F. Sekerka 75 Energy Relations and the Energy-Momentum Tensor in Continuum Mechanics By J. D. Eshelby 82 The Interactions of Composition and Stress in Crystalline Solids By F. e. Larche and 1. W. Cahn 120 II.