Dear colleague,

As part of the commemorations of its centennial, the Royal Spanish Society of Mathematics (RSME) is organizing jointly with the European Mathematical Society (EMS) a Mathematical Weekend that will be held in Bilbao from October 7 to 9, 2011. As is usual in the EMS Mathematical Weekends, the meeting will begin on Friday afternoon and will end on Sunday at lunch time. All mathematicians, from Europe and elsewhere, are warmly invited to participate.

As in previous editions of the EMS Mathematical Weekends, there will be several special sessions where some of the most prominent researchers in their fields will give a talk. In this edition, these are the four topics that have been selected for the special sessions: Groups and Representations, Symplectic Geometry, PDEs in Mechanics and Physics, and Functional Analysis Methods in Quantum Information.

Related to the fourth topic, which presents the modern connections between Functional Analysis and Information Theory, Computer Science, Probability and Geometry, there will be a plenary talk and 6 invited contributions. The fact that the EMS and the RSME have included these new connections of Functional Analysis as a 'hot topic' illustrates their relevance for future research. It is hence a wonderful occasion, specially for young researchers, to assist and have contact with some leading researchers in the area.

We hope to see you in Bilbao this fall.

Jesus Bastero and David Perez-Garcia