It is our intention to organize a well-respected international conference series on scientific computing and partial differential equations in Hong Kong every three years. Since 2002, the SCPDE conference-series have been respectively held in 2002, 2005, 2008, 2011, 2014 and then 2017 at the Hong Kong Baptist University. These conferences were well attended, by international experts in respective disciplines and were found highly successful in providing a forum for the exchange of ideas, and latest results within a multi-disciplinary setting. Many top scientists in scientific computing and partial differential equations, including academicians from America, Europe and China, attended the conferences and presented their research results. A conference proceeding for the first conference was published in American Mathematical Society's Contemporary Mathematics series, a prestigious volume series of AMS. The second conference proceeding was published in Science Press series, a specialized publisher for such conference proceedings. The third one was published as a special issue in the Advances in Applied Mathematics and Mechanics.
There have been very rapid developments of scientific computing and partial differential equations in Hong Kong, in part due to the research carried out within the Department of Applied Mathematics at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and increasing interest from sister departments in other higher education institutions in Hong Kong. As Hong Kong transforms herself into a high-tech industrial region, the need for scientific computing will rise dramatically, as scientific computing is commonly acknowledged to provide a third arm to research; the other arms being theoretical and experimental techniques.