It is a privilege to welcome again the FBPnews, almost ten years after the launching of the ESF/FBP scientific programme, now in a new format, with new people and renewed purposes. Since the end of that programme, in January 1998, the need of a newsletter to integrate and disseminate the information about the activities and the progresses of the interdisciplinary field of Free Boundary Problems has been felt. The continuation of the series of trianual conferences, as the FBP2002 held last June in Trento and the next one foreseen to take place in Portugal, shows the vitality and the importance of these mathematical topics in different domains of science and technology, in particular, the interdisciplinary role of Mathematics. The new FBPNews is more than a new series of the old newsletter since in addition to the up-dated news, announcements and reports, views and feature articles, its new and only electronic format will provide a Forum open to the World "FBP community", including the contributions of everyone with a real interest in fruitful discussions and interaction and serving the rich tradition of the FBP conferences.

The first series of the FBPNews consisted of 14 printed issues, that can be found in the FBP archive, and was started with the specific purpose of serving as the newsletter of the European Science Foundation (ESF) Scientific Programme on "Mathematical Treatment of Free Boundary Problems" (FBP). The first issue was printed in April 1993 and the last one in December of 1997 and was freely distributed over five hundred and fifty copies among 45 countries all over the world, but an electronic version existed on the web since July 1994. This programme, that was coordinated by a Scientific Committee, was initially approved by the ESF for a period of four years with the specific aim of enhancing the mathematical treatment of FBP in Europe, including the modelling, the theoretical analysis and the numerical approximation. But in order to support three of the "FBP:Theory and Applications" conferences (Toledo, Spain, in 1993, Zakopane, Poland, in 1995 and Crete, Greece, in 1997) it was extended to five years.

The main ESF sponsored activities consisted of workshops, a total of 34 were held in 14 European countries, three summer courses and partial support to other five scientific meetings, in addition to a large number of fellowships to young scientists and a few individual visits of senior people, to support the interaction between specialists. This programme has provided an enhanced stimulus and significant contribution, not only at the European level but also worldwide, in particular, in the USA and Japan, in the field in the last decade of the XXth century. The subject has evolved to new directions and, of course, continued after the conclusion of the ESF-FBP programme. It initiated a new series of meetings on the Numerical Methods for FBP, the INTERPHASE series, the last one was held at the University of Maryland, USA, and the tenth to be held in Cambridge, UK, next April. Also the launching, by the Oxford University Press in July 1999, of a new mathematical journal on the mathematical modelling, analysis and computation of Interfaces and Free Boundaries, that will continue the publication of its fifth volume in 2003 with the European Mathematical Society, is a clear indication of the current importance and relevance of this challenging interdisciplinary field.

But a main catalyst for the identification and development of this field has been, and probably will continue to be in the near future, the interdisciplinary congress series on "Free Boundary Problems: Theory and Applications", that had started in 1981, at Montecatini (Italy), continued in 1984 and held at Maubuisson (France), in 1987 at Irsee (Germany), in 1990 at Montreal (Canada), in 1993 at Toledo (Spain), in 1995 at Zakopane (Poland), in 1997 at Crete (Greece), in 1999 at Chiba (Japan), in 2002 at Trento (Italy) and is foreseen to be held in 2005 in Portugal. Under the new editorial co-ordination of Eberhard Bänsch and José Miguel Urbano, with an active co-operation of a helpful network of correspondents and the participation of the FBP world community, I am sure that the new FBPNews will continue to serve also this series of conferences in its best "open-mindedness" tradition, as well as the whole field of FBP, taken in a broad sense.

Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques, 17 December 2002,
José Francisco Rodrigues