Abstract
The relatively brief history of nonlinear chemical dynamics has been marked by two surprising gaps of nearly 40 years duration. The first occupies the period between Bray’s discovery [1] of the first homogeneous chemical oscillator and Belousov’s equally accidental finding [2] of the cerium catalyzed bromate oxidation of citric acid. The second is the interval between Turing’s 1952 prediction [3] of diffusion-induced stationary spatial structures in reacting systems and the first experimental evidence of their existence recently provided by De Kepper and collaborators [4]. In both cases, the second discovery generated an explosion of activity and insight, both experimentally and mechanistically.