Every cell in your body is surrounded by a two molecules thick self-assembled layer of lipid molecules. The same few nanometer thin film also surrounds many of the internal organelles—such as the nucleus, the endoplasmic reticulum, or mitochondria. Like virtually anything in biology, these biomembranes are bewilderingly complex, and so it might come as no small surprise that many of their important properties can be understood extremely well using simple and elegant physical theories, borrowing from continuum elasticity, differential geometry, and (as always) a smattering of thermodynamics. In this talk I will survey some of the beautiful models that have been developed to understand lipid membranes—their shapes, their fluctuations, how these enable some of their functions, etc.—and conclude with a few more recent developments concerning membranes with a broken up-down symmetry, which are still not very well understood. My goal is to show you that these are fascinating systems, replete with interesting problems, to which physicists can make meaningful contributions.

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