This Workshop is a regular meeting taking place in Viña del Mar, Chile, since December 1985. To our knowledge, it is the first regular international meeting of Physics taking place in Chile every two years. Furthermore, it is the oldest meeting in South America on Nonlinear Physics and statistical mechanics. It has played a great role in the development of Physics in Chile, especially in the area of Nonlinear Physics and Non-Equilibrium Statistical Mechanics. Since the first Workshop, we focused in a meeting having an important pedagogical component. We can say today that we have been successful given the great development of Nonlinear Physics in Chile.

FOTO 1: V Workshop on Instabilities and non-equilibrium structures, Chile 1993

The Proceedings have been published regularly with Kluwer Academic Publishers (Holland) in the Series on Nonlinear Phenomena and Complex Systems of the Centro de Física No Lineal y Sistemas Complejos de Santiago (CFNL). The founder and Director of the Workshop is Enrique Tirapegui, who is also founder of the Non Linear Group in la Escuela de Ingeniería y Ciencias de la Facultad de Física y Matemática de la Universidad de Chile and Founder and Director of the CFNL, with the help of Professor Danilo Villarroel of University Federico Santa Maria. Since the third edition, the workshop has been organized in collaboration with Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, being Walter Zeller (until 1995) and Javier Martínez, main organizers from PUCV side.

FOTO 2: XVI Workshop on Instabilities and non-equilibrium structures, Valparaiso 2017.

In a previous Workshops deserve a special mention since they were in honor of the 60 years of two world known scientists in the area which have been essential in the creation and the development of this meeting: the 12th one in 2009 in honor of Professor Pierre Coullet and the 14th in 2013 in honor of Professor Marc Etienne Brachet. 16th Session has a very special character since it appears on the occasion of the 50th birthday of seminal manuscripts of Dissipative Structures in Chemical Systems by I. Prigogine; in which Prigogine establishes the basis of the concept of dissipative structures.

FOTO 3: Pierre Coullet, XVI Workshop on Instabilities and Non-equilibrium structures,

Chle 2015

FOTO 4: Dinner, XVI Workshop on Instabilities and Non-equilibrium structures, Chile 2015 (From left to right: Orazio Descalzi, Amin Chabchoub, Edward Arévalo, Saliya Coulibaly, Marcel Clerc, Mustapha Tlidi, Ignacio Ortega, Majid Taki, Cristina Masoller, Mario Wilson and Mónica García Ñustes)

FOTO 5: Enrique Tirapegui’s Speech, XVI Workshop on Instabilities and Non-equilibrium structures, Chile 2015 (In front: Günter Radons, Igor Aranson, Pierre Coullet and Giorgio Sonnino)