Journal of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics 77 (2013) 120–122 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Journal of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics jou rn al h omepa g e: w ww.elsevier.com/locate/jappmathmech Results of the XXIII International Congress on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics  S.A. Lychev, F.L. Chernous’ko The XXIII International Congress on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (ICTAM 2012) was held from the 19th to the 24th of August in Beijing, and sessions of the General Assembly of the International Union for Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (IUTAM) also took place. The Chinese National Convention Centre was chosen as the location. This building is one of the central structures of a set of buildings constructed for the 2008 Olympic Games. The Olympic complex astonishes the imagination with its scale and technological and architectural solutions that, undoubtedly, had a positive effect on the participants at the congress. The International Congress on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, a very large and impressive event, is held every four years. The last time it took place was in Adelaide (South Australia) in 2008. It is relevant here to say a few words about the history of the Congress. The idea of organizing regular ICTAM congresses was born at a conference on hydrodynamics and aerodynamics held in Innsbruck in September 1922. It was here at this conference that Theodore von Karman proposed that a regular international congress should be held, the subject matter of which should encompass all the fields of mechanics and its applications. The first such congress was organized by I. M. Burgers and K. B. Bizeno in 1924 in Delft (the Netherlands). In the course of the work of the congress, the organizing committee decided to create a permanent organization that ensured that congresses were regularly held. At the sixth congress, that took place in Paris in 1946, it was given the title of “International Union of Applied Mechanics”. The adjective “theoretical” was added at the XIII Congress which emphasized the special importance of theoretical studies, including the development and substantiation of methods for solving applied problems. It should be noted that the XIII Congress was held in Moscow in 1972 (the president was Academician N. I. Muskhelishvili). The president of the XXIII Congress was an Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Professor Yi-long Bai, a specialist in the field of thermoplasticity and fracture mechanics. The XXIII Congress was sponsored by the Chinese Society of Theoretical and Applied. Mechanics and also by a number of research and design organizations and educational institutions, in particular, the China Association for Science and Technology, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Institute of Mechanics, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the central universities and colleges of China, design organizations and scientific-technical societies. All this showed the great interest of the world community and the Chinese govern- ment in the development of mechanics as a fundamental and applied science and also in improving the methods for the training of young specialists. The papers accepted by the Congress had passed through a thorough review and selection procedure. Investigators from 60 countries took part in the work of the Congress. Of the 1887 submissions, 1577 were accepted which underlines the high standards of the Congress. With respect to the number of papers submitted, China was in first place (with 489, of which 225 were lectures), the USA was in second place (with 204 of which 160 were lectures) and Russia was in third place (with 112 of which 50 were lectures). Some estimate of the quality can be obtained by using the percentage of rejected papers: USA 9%, Russia 18%, China 26%. All the 64 papers presented by British academics were accepted while 38% submitted by Indian scientists were rejected. Of the 1577 papers that were accepted, 1271 were reported on. The lectures were divided into plenary lectures (there were just two of these at the opening and closing of the congress with a duration of 1 hour), sectional lectures lasting 45 minutes, 20 minute lectures and three-minute seminars. The authors of these three-minute talks were also given the chance to present a poster paper. The Rodney Hill prize (Huajian Gao, USA), the Batchelor prize (Detlef Lohse, the Netherlands) and the young scientist prizes (M. Bosco, France, D. Kochmann and H. Wang, USA) were also presented as part of the work of the Congress. The president of the Congress, Professor Yi-long Bai, the general secretary of ICTAM 2012 Jianxiang Wang and other officials attended the opening ceremony, and an instrumental ensemble played remarkable lyrical compositions on traditional Chinese musical instruments. The scientific programme opened with a paper presented by Professor Shiya Chen (China) “Large-scale models of fluid mechanics” concerned with the development of hybrid computational procedures in which models on different scale levels corresponding to fundamentally different characteristic spatial and time scales are combined. He gave examples of agreement between models of molecular and continuum mechanics and their applications in aerodynamic problems. The diversity of specializations presented in the papers does not enable us to  Prikl. Mat.Mekh., Vol. 77, No. 1, pp. 167–170, 2013. 0021-8928/$ – see front matter © 2013 Published by Elsevier Ltd. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jappmathmech.2013.04.016