ECM-22 Satellite

Crystallography at the start of the 21st century: mathematical and symmetry aspects

Budapest, Hungary, August 2004

The XXII European Crystallographic Meeting, held in Budapest, Hungary, was preceded by a three-day Satellite Meeting on Crystallography at the start of the 21st century: Mathematical and Symmetry Aspects, which represented the first public activity of the MaThCryst International Workgroup (www.lcm3b.uhp-nancy.fr/mathcryst/), created to draw the attention of researchers working in crystallography and related fields to the fundamentals aspects too often neglected in favor of a blind machine-based solution strategy (IUCr Newsletter, 10(3), 2003 2).

The Satellite, supported by the Hungarian National Committee of the IUCr and the ECM-22 Organizing Committee, and sponsored by the Commission on Inorganic and Mineral Structures of the IUCr (IUCr-CIMS), was attended by 51 participants with different backgrounds (chemistry, physics, mineralogy, mathematics…) from 20 countries. There were six thematic sessions on diverse topics such us geminography (twinned crystals), OD structures, normalizers of space groups, graph theory, chirality and achirality in crystal structures, higher dimension crystallography, tilings and ball packings, modulated structures, and quasicrystals. The proceedings will soon appear in a special issue of Zeitschrift für Kristallographie and will include peer-reviewed original and review articles by the lecturers, as well as contributed peer-reviewed articles by the participants.

The satellite also included poster sessions. The electronic version (PDF file) of the abstracts is available for download from the website (www.lcm3b.uhp-nancy.fr/mathcryst/satellite.htm). The next public activity of the MaThCryst group will be a Summer School on 'Mathematical and Theoretical Crystallography' at the U. Henri Poincaré in Nancy, France, June 20-24, 2005, under the auspices of the IUCr and of the ECA (see announcement in IUCr Newsletter, Vol. 12, No. 3, page 22 or visit www.lcm3b.uhp-nancy.fr/mathcryst/nancy2005.htm).

Massimo Nespolo, Organizer, ECM-22 Satellite Meeting