Preface

Abstract

In 1997, the International Conference on Computational Physics (PC'97) was held as a joint venture between the Annual Meeting of the Division of Computational Physics and the Forum on Industrial and Applied Physics of the American Physical Society. The International Union of Pure and Applied Physics and the European Physical Society also sponsored the event. The meeting, which was held 25-28 August 1997 on the campus of the University of California, Santa Cruz, highlighted basic and applied computational physics, and the applications to research enterprises at universities, industry and Government laboratories. The interdisciplinary approach was well received, and there are plans to continue with the meeting. The scientific programme consisted of review, invited and contributed papers, organized into seven half-day sessions. The invited and contributed talks were focused around the areas of applications (industrial devices, materials and processes; environmental and geological phenomena; computational materials science; cosmology/astrophysics; particle physics phenomena; nuclear physics; plasma physics; fluid dynamics) and methods (multipole; computational fluid dynamics; object-oriented methods; quantum computing methods; Monte Carlo; electronic structure). Before the start of the conference, a day was set aside to hold tutorials on applications and methods of computational physics. Three of the papers from the conference have been accepted for this journal, and appear at the end of this issue. Barry Klein University of California, Davis