Editor’s Introduction

The International Mathematica Symposium (IMS) brings together Mathematica users from all over the world. IMS conferences have been held at widely dispersed locations—Southampton (1995), Rovaniemi (1997), Linz (1999), Tokyo (2001), London (2003), and Banff (2004)—but IMS 2005 was the first IMS to be held in the southern hemisphere.

IMS conferences allow us to share our passion for Mathematica—the key scientific computing environment used in our daily research. The multidisciplinary nature of IMS encourages interdisciplinary discussion and the exchange of ideas. Interdisciplinary research requires a special tool for communicating ideas—and, as is clear from these proceedings, Mathematica is the best such tool.

The argument about whether IMS proceedings should be printed or provided in electronic-only format is likely to continue for a few more years. This year, again, we have compromised: the electronic proceedings, consisting of all accepted contributed papers, were published as a CD []. Two special issues of The Mathematica Journal are devoted to the best selected papers, which were subjected to further review, along with two keynote presentations—Stephen Wolfram on The Future of Computation and Eric Weisstein on Making MathWorld.

References

Electronic Proceedings of the Seventh International Mathematica Symposium, Perth, Western Australia (P. Abbott and S. McCarthy, eds.), Champaign: Wolfram Media, Inc., 2005 ISBN 1-57955-050-9.