中文摘要：

人们对泡沫习以为常,却很难理解它的奇特性质,比如几乎完全由空气组成的泡沫,既能像固体一样发生弹性形变,又能像流体一样发生流动,这正是泡沫物理学的研究内容之一.泡沫物理是一门古老的学科,早在19世纪中下叶,气泡和泡沫结构静力学的描述已经完美,之后没有大的发展,直到1990年前后,随着流体力学、微观显像技术和计算技术等学科的发展,以及受材料科学和工业生产的需求,泡沫物理研究再次活跃起来.文章第一作者曾跟随英国皇家学会院士Denis Weaire从事泡沫物理研究多年,在他的演讲和个人收藏中,文章作者积累了一些材料,在此基础上,又仔细查阅了相关文献,整理成此文,它基本概括了泡沫结构静力学发展历程中的重要事件.

英文摘要：

A liquid foam is a dense packing of gas bubbles in a relatively small amount of surfactant solution, and is common in daily life. However, the physics underlying foams is poorly understood. For example, sudsy foam somehow behaves like a springy solid or flows like a fluid, despite being made almost completely of air. The statics of dry foams was established around the late 19th century through, for instance, the laws of equilibrium of foam structure proposed by J. A. Plateau in 1873, and the optimal division of space with a tetrakaidecahedra （ i. e. Kelvin＇ s partition） by W. Thomson （Lord Kelvin） in 1887. After nearly a century＇ s silence, research on the statics of dry foams was rekindled in 1992 by K. Brakke＇ s development of software for modeling liquid surfaces shaped by various forces and constraints, and the consequent finding of the Weaire-Phelan partition in 1993. Since the 1980s the dynamics of both dry and wet foams became the focus of foam physics, but many challenges such as the rheological properties, instabilities and so on still remain.