Twenty-Five Years of Springer Series in Synergetics The year 2002 marks the 25th anniversary of the Springer Series in S- ergetics. It started in 1977 with my book “Synergetics. An Introduction. Nonequilibrium Phase Transitions and Self-Organization in Physics, Ch- istry and Biology”. In the near future, the 100th volume of this series will be published. Its success has been made possible by the contributions of outstanding authors who presented their quite often pioneering results to the science community well beyond the borders of a special discipline. Indeed, interdisciplinarity is one of the main features of this series. But interdis- plinarity is not enough: The main goal is the search for common features of self-organizing systems in a great variety of seemingly quite di?erent systems, or, still more precisely speaking, the search for general principles underlying the spontaneous formation of spatial, temporal or functional structures. The objects studied may be as diverse as lasers and ?uids in physics, pattern formation in chemistry, morphogenesis in biology, brain functions in neur- ogy or self-organization in a city. As is witnessed by several volumes, great attention is being paid to the pivotal interplay between deterministic and stochastic processes, as well as to the dialogue between theoreticians and experimentalists. All this has contributed to a remarkable cross-fertilization between disciplines and to a deeper unterstanding of complex systems. The timeliness and potential of such an approach are also mirrored – among other indicators – bynumerous interdisciplinary workshops and conferencesall over the world.
