Granular material physics of granular matter and whose book "The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes" remains an important reference to this day. According to material scientist Patrick Richard, "Granular materials are ubiquitous in nature and are the second-most manipulated material in industry (the first one is water)". In some sense, granular materials do not constitute a single phase of matter but have characteristics reminiscent of solids, liquids, or gases depending on the average energy per grain. However, in each of these states granular materials also exhibit properties which are unique. Granular materials also exhibit a wide range of pattern forming
Granular computing Granular computing Granular computing (GrC) is an emerging computing paradigm of information processing that concerns the processing of complex information entities called "information granules", which arise in the process of data abstraction and derivation of knowledge from information or data. Generally speaking, information granules are collections of entities that usually originate at the numeric level and are arranged together due to their similarity, functional or physical adjacency, indistinguishability, coherency, or the like. At present, granular computing is more a "theoretical perspective" than a coherent set of methods or principles. As a theoretical perspective, it encourages an approach to data that