Date: 17 to 21 December 2007
Place: Hotel San Martin, Viña del Mar
Objective and History of the meeting
This Workshop is a regular meeting taking place in Viña del Mar, Chile, since December 1985. To our knowledge it is the first regular international meeting of Physics taking place in Chile every two years, and it has played a great role in the development of Physics in Chile, and especially in the area of Nonlinear Physics and Non Equilibrium Statistical Mechanics. Since the first Workshop we focused in a meeting having an important pedagogical component, and for this purpose two self contained courses on important topics of the subject have been included in the activities. We can say now that we have succeeded since we have to day a great development of Nonlinear Physics in Chile and in particular a strong research group has been created in the Universidad de Chile, our main University, in the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics, where we have also the best School of Engineering of our country. The Proceedings have been published regularly with Kluwer Academic Publishers (Holland), first in the Series Mathematics and its Applications and after in the Series on Nonlinear Phenomena and Complex Systems which was created by Professor Enrique Tirapegui, Director of this Workshop since 1985, and Professor Servet Martinez, both in the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the Universidad de Chile.
A very important objective of the meeting has always been to put young chilean and southamerican students, as well as young researchers, in direct contact with the best physicists in the area at the international level who gave every two years an state of the art review of the development of the subject in the world. The hope was to start international collaborations involving the best groups in the world and the best young people of our region. This aspect has been one of the great successes of this Workshop, and one essential feature for this achievement has been its continuity in time. The best proof of the previous statement is that in this 11th version we have several invited lecturers from the South Cone ( mainly Argentine, Uruguay and Chile) and that many collaborations between groups of these countries can be traced back to this Workshop.
The first two meetings were organized with the support of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the Universidad de Chile and the Department of Physics of Universidad Federico Santa María of Valparaíso. Since the third meeting Universidad Católica de Valparaíso replaced Universidad Santa María. This Workshop has been supported by the Chilean Academy of Sciences since 1985.