In 1976, at the quiet Woudschoten Conference Center in Zeist, The Netherlands, the Dutch numerical mathematics community organized a conference at which leading international experts gave lectures on important topics in the field. It developed into an annual conference, providing an introduction to and an overview of groundbreaking developments in numerical analysis and scientific computing. The Woudschoten Conference, later co-organized with the numerical mathematics community in Flanders, Belgium, is attended by Dutch and Flemish researchers in numerical mathematics, from PhD students to full professors, and including industrial researchers. The conference is renowned for its unique format and informal setting, and for its lectures on timely topics, presented by world-leading experts in the field. The list of lecturers at the Woudschoten Conference over the years is impressive.
In 2026, the Woudschoten Conference was organized for the 50th time. To celebrate this unique event, lecturers from the 2017–2024 conferences were invited to contribute to this book. They could choose to write either a review chapter, a chapter on new work or a combination of both. The topics cover the following subareas of numerical mathematics: discretization, computability, time integration, linear algebra, high-performance computing, optimal control, scientific machine learning, and computational finance, optics and biology. In the spirit of the Woudschoten Conference, the book is intended to serve as both a reference work and a source of inspiration for all those interested in numerical mathematics, from its theoretical foundations to its wide range of applications.