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Self-avoiding walks and polygons -- an overview

This is a rather personal review of the problem of self-avoiding walks and polygons. After defining the problem, and outlining what is known rigorously and what is merely conjectured, I highlight the major outstanding problems. I then give several applications in which the I have been involved. These include a study of surface adsorption of polymers, counting possible paths in a telecommunication network, hitting probabilities of SAWs in a rectangle, and the modelling of biological experiments on polymers. I hope to show that SAWs are not only of intrinsic mathematical interest, but also have many interesting and useful applications.