It was a great pleasure to welcome the lecturers and participants of the XI
Max Born Symposium. Some of them attended for the first, but we hope,
not the last time. There were also many who already attended the previous
symposium, and their scientific contribution helped the organizers to make
the symposium successful. The participants' knowledge and enthusiasm for
all the phenomena connected with diffusion was contagious and diffused easily
in our small community.
The scope of the lectures presented at this symposium gives some kind
of status nascendi of non-Brownian statistical physics four years on from our
previous V Max Born Symposium in Kudowa and the famous Workshop held
at the same time in Nice. As before, we tried to get together experts in the
field of basic research, as well as in the now fast growing applications of the
theory of diffusion and transport. In agreement with the trends in
contemporary statistical physics and chaotic dynamics, there were many excursions
into other domains, like biophysics and ecology, geophysics, econophysics and,
very recently, astrophysics.