What is IMACS

The beginnings of IMACS date from 1955. A Conference on Analogue Computation was held at the Brussels Free University, attended by researchers, observers and managers of the simulation laboratories that existed at the time, many of those laboratories existing as byproducts of the enormous technological developments that had been brought about by the second World War. The participation was truly international, with participants coming from most European countries, the United States and Japan.

During the Conference, it was realized that there was a need for establishing some permanent means of communication between the members of this new scientific community. What resulted was the creation AICA (the International Association for Analogue Computation). AICA was legally incorporated under the Belgian Law in 1956. Beginning with analog computation in 1955, the scope of AICA expanded with the growth of scientific computation and its necessary attributes from applied mathematics (in particular numerical analysis) to mathematical modeling and to many of those new development in the sciences that became possible only because computers had appeared on the scene.

AICA changed its name to IMACS (the International Association for Mathematics and Computers in Simulation) in 1976 to reflect this widening of horizons. Together with this change of name, IMACS expanded its administrative structure, with legal incorporations and offices in both the United States and Belgium.

What the birth of AICA in 1955-56 illustrated was the emergence, spurred by new technology (in particular those new technologies having to do with electronic means that mechanize information and computation) of "interdisciplinary new disciplines" (meaning that they had roots in several of the older established disciplines). This example was followed in short order by IFAC (Automatic Control, 1957), IMEKO (Measurement - 1959), IFORS (Operations Research - 1959) and IFIP (Information Processing- 1960). The "Five" decided to coordinate their activities with the creation of FIACC (the Five International Associations Coordinating Committee that was created with the support of UNESCO in 1972).

(Информация с сайта www. cs. rutgers. edu/~imacs/)

Дата добавления: 2015-07-18