Soft matter as a playground for the exploration of space partitioning

In this talk I will give an overview of some of the remarkable structures encountered in self-assembled soft matter systems, primarily in the form of block copolymers. Block copolymers are macromolecules whose free energy minimisation is driven by an intricate competition between interfacial enthalpic contributions from domains of unlike chemical species and entropic contributions from the long-chain statistics of the polymeric molecules. A number of highlights are presented showing many novel kaleidoscopic morphologies, including 2D tiling patterns and 3D networks many of which show hierarchical features, i.e. ordering on multiple length scales.