The 2012 annual meeting of the German Mathematician's Association in Saarbrücken reached out to our community with at least two minisymposia: ''Dynamical Systems'' and ''Patterns and Waves'', and its artwork logo featured on the conference poster, printed program and bags:

Part of the conference poster.

However, the rumour is that this picture was chosen randomly by the non-math designer, and some believe it pays an abstract tribute to the eyes of the university logo's owl.

Of course many other facets of mathematics were presented during the conference, virtually so in the public lecture by Günter Ziegler titled "This is no(t) art! Ten pictures out of mathematics" ("Das ist doch keine Kunst! Zehn Bilder aus der Mathematik"). The meeting also commemorated Friedrich Hirzebruch, who sadly passed away in May.

The "Patterns and Waves" minisymposium was organized by Mats Ehrnström (Trondheim) and Erik Wahlen (Lund). It comprised 16 talks discussion water waves through several models (KdV, Kawahara, \020Euler, Whitham, Camassa-Holm,...), and in various contexts, but also chemotaxis and fungal hyphae models, reaction diffusion and elektrokinetics, and variational integrators. See the abstracts for more details.

The "Dynamical Systems" minisymposium was organized by Michael Hermann (Saarbrücken) and Hartmut Schwetlick (Bath). The 13 talks ranged from homo- and heteroclinic bifurcations, snaking, continuation software, delay equations, lattices, symmetries and slow manifolds to KdV and NLS dynamics, and coupling of quantum mechanical with dissipative systems. See the abstracts for more details.

Epilogue. Some stayed until beyond the end of the minisymposium, which coincided with that of the conference, and were fortunate enough to follow the local M. Herrmann to the original "Gastbrauhaus zum Stiefel". After excellent local food and beers we went on to explore Saarbrücken's Thursday night live through a few bars. Indeed, internet conferences would be a sad future....

Jens Rademacher