During the period of September 3 to 7, 1984 a symposium on “Nonequilibrium Dynamics in Chemical Systems” was organized by the Centre de Recherche Paul Pascal in Bordeaux, France. It was supported, primarily, by the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and attended by about 90 participants from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Israël, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, Poland, Tchekoslovakia, Spain, United Kingdom, United States and Zimbabwe. A list of topics and speakers is found in the table below. Two highly successful conferences centered on nonlinear phenomena in chemical systems far from equilibrium had already been organized by the Bordeaux group in the past. The first of them [1], held in September 1978, was dominated by the theme that nonequilibrium can act as a source of order. Sustained oscillations and bistability were the two principal phenomena studied from this point of view. Thanks to the systematic utilization of the continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR) the study of open systems could finally be realized. Reliable state diagrams were thus produced, notably by the Bordeaux group, in which one could identify the transition points to new states. The Belousov-Zhabotinskii (BZ) reaction and its variants were the main vehicle on which these new ideas could be illustrated. The second Bordeaux conference [2], held in September 1981, was largely dominated by the major progress that had just marked two vital areas of this field: the discovery of new classes of chemical oscillators; and the invasion of chaotic dynamics in chemistry. These themes also dominated the first Gordon Conference on Chemical Oscillations held in New Hampshire in July 1982. In contrast to its two predecessors, the third Bordeaux conference held in September 1984 was not dominated by a single central theme. New questions were raised in situations in which until very recently things were considered to be perfectly clear. Simple, “universal” recipes did not seem to provide satisfactory explanations of new and intriguing observations. Diversity was invading subjects where previously researchers had expected to find unity. Still from this process of reassessment of many of the concepts that had dominated the field of nonlinear chemistry in the last years, one could clearly recognize some sign posts announcing important progress in the near future. In what follows we describe a few characteristic examples.