The phenomenon of cell division has for years served as a paradigm of autonomous cellular motion and the mysteries thereof. In this talk I will review the modern biological concepts of cytokinesis and the attempts that have been made to place these concepts on a quantitative footing. I will then propose a simple continuum theory of the cytoskeleton and specialize this so as to ultimatly arrive at a discription of cytokinesis in the sea urchin egg. Using experimentally derived values of the relevant mechanical parameters the finite element method will then be used to conduct a systematic elucidation of model predictions.

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1998-1999 Mathematics in Biology