Preface to the special issue on "recent developments and new directions in thin-film flow"

Thin films of fluids are of central importance in numerous industrial, biomedical, geophysical and domestic applications, and display a rich and varied range of behaviours, including pattern formation, dewetting, rupture and finite-time blow up. As well as being of great interest in their own right, thin-film flows provide a “test bed” for research into a variety of challenging nonlinear problems in engineering, physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics. As a consequence, research by a wide range of scientists, using a variety of analytical, numerical and experimental techniques on many different aspects of thin-film flow, has grown significantly in recent years, as novel applications have continued to appear and increasingly sophisticated theoretical and experimental techniques have been developed.