On the occasion of the fourth International Conference on Industrial and
Applied Mathematics!, we decided to organize a sequence of 4
minisymposia devoted to the mathematical aspects and the numerical
aspects of Quantum Chemistry. Our goal was to bring together scientists
from different communities, namely mathematicians, experts at numerical
analysis and computer science, chemists, just to see whether this
heterogeneous set of lecturers can produce a rather homogeneous
presentation of the domain to an uninitiated audience. To the best of
our knowledgde, nothing of this kind had never been tempted so far. It
seemed to us that it was the good time for doing it, both . because the
interest of applied mathematicians into the world of computational
chemistry has exponentially increased in the past few years, and because
the community of chemists feels more and more concerned with the
numerical issues. Indeed, in the early years of Quantum Chemistry, the
pioneers (Coulson, Mac Weeny, just to quote two of them) used to solve
fundamental equations modelling toy systems which could be simply
numerically handled in view of their very limited size. The true
difficulty arose with the need to model larger systems while possibly
taking into account their interaction with their environment. Hand
calculations were no longer possible, and computing science came into
the picture.