Whereas the previous meetings focused on relationships of interval mathematics to other areas, Interval, 98 having global optimization as an application area in mind, put strong emphasis on traditional interval methods. New results on well established methods were presented, and complexity issues were discussed. Several talks dealt with new, efficient implementation techniques.
Nevertheless, a number of interesting and surprising applications were suggested. Take the foundations of physics or a combination of Western and Oriental medicine as some striking examples.
All in all, there were 31 talks. The refereed proceedings of the conference will be published as a special issue of the "Reliable Computing" journal.
The conference took place in the relaxed atmosphere of the Holiday Inn Hotel and was supported by the national Natural Science Foundation of China and Nanjing University. The German Research Association (DFG) supported some of the German participants.
Due to the facilities in the hotel, the everlasting friendliness of the Chinese organizers, and a very interesting bus excursion to the touristic highlights of Nanjing, there were lots of possibilities to establish new scientific contacts or intensify existing ones.
Juergen Wolff von Gudenberg