Geometry underlies the mechanical stiffening and softening of an indented floating film.

A basic paradigm underlying the Hookean mechanics of amorphous, isotropic solids is that small deformations are proportional to the magnitude of external forces. However, slender bodies may undergo large deformations even under minute forces, leading to nonlinear responses rooted in purely geometric effects. Here we study the indentation of a polymer film on a liquid bath.

Mesoscale structure of wrinkle patterns and defect-proliferated liquid crystalline phases.

Thin solids often develop elastic instabilities and subsequently complex, multiscale deformation patterns. Revealing the organizing principles of this spatial complexity has ramifications for our understanding of morphogenetic processes in plant leaves and animal epithelia and perhaps even the formation of human fingerprints. We elucidate a primary source of this morphological complexity-an incompatibility between an elastically favored "microstructure" of uniformly spaced wrinkles and a "macrostructure" imparted through the wrinkle director and dictated by confinement forces.