Growth Models And The Question Of Universality Classes

In the past many papers have appeared which simulated surface growth with different growth models. The results showed that, if models differed only slightly in their `growth' rules, the resulting surfaces may belong to different universality classes, i.e. they are described by different differential equations. In the present paper we describe a mapping of ``growth rules'' to differential operators and give plausibility arguments for this mapping. We illustrate the validity of our theory by applying it to published results.