PREFACE: The Fourth Nordic Symposium on Computer Simulations in Natural Science

The Fourth Nordic Symposium on Computer Simulations in Natural Science was held at the Park Hotel in Sandefjord, Norway on the 23–25 August 1990. It gathered nearly 70 participants from several Nordic and non-Nordic countries, and from several disciplines, even though a majority had their background in physics. During two intense days, nine invited lectures, and a host of short contributed talks and posters were presented, covering a broad range of topics within computational science. These proceedings, containing many of these presentations, demonstrate this broadness amply. The invited speakers and their chosen topics were: Per Bak (Brookhaven National Lab., USA), presented his ideas on Self-organized Criticality, applying them to models of earth-quakes and economy; James M Bardeen (University of Washington, USA), discussed ways of generating realistic fractal landscapes by simulating erosion processess; Bernard Derrida (CEN Saclay, France), discussed the problem of polymers that are strongly interacting with the medium in which they are dissolved; Hans J Herrmann (HLRZ, Germany, and CEN Saclay, France), presented an overview of a new approach to the modelling of fracture; Mogens Hogh Jensen (Nordita, Denmark), who described recent models of fully-developed turbulence; Kimmo Kaski (Tampere University of Technology, Finland), talked on the modelling of molecular films by Monte Carlo simulations; Johnny Petersen (IBM, Norway), gave a presentation on parallel computation; Inge Roeggen (University of Tromso, Norway), presented work on intramolecular binding energies; and lastly Clifford Woodward (University of Lund, Sweden), talked on his Monte Carlo simulations of Caldbindin D9k. We take this opportunity to thank these speakers—and all the others—for their interesting talks. We feel that the symposium met its goals: providing a common meeting ground for researchers using computers as an essential tool, in order to create contacts and providing a cross-disiplinary snapshot of their work. For the organizers, the editing of these proceedings has been an unexpectedly pleasant task, giving us an opportunity to interact with and get to know a little the many very capable researchers that have contributed to the present volume. We want to thank the two behind-the-scene organizers, Gerd Jarrett and Inger Lauvstad, who were instrumental in all phases of the planning of the meeting, besides the carrying through of the meeting itself. We also wish to thank NAVF, Nordisk Industrifond, Nordisk Kulturfond, Nordita, and the Norwegian Physical Society, besides the Departments of Physics at the University of Oslo, and the Norwegian Institute of Technology for their generous financial support.