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 [1]. 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

[1] 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.