Probability and Materials: from Nano- to Macro-Scale: A summary

The National Science Foundation funded a workshop entitled “Probability and Materials: from Nano- to Macro-Scale” at Johns Hopkins University on January 5–7, 2005. The goal of this workshop was to bring together a diverse multi-disciplinary and multi-skilled group of researchers, all of whom have an interest in the application of probabilistic models to multi-scale analysis of materials. This paper provides a summary of the workshop discussions and provides an introduction to a selected set of technical papers that were presented during the workshop and appear later in this special issue. A set of recommendations for important future research in probability and materials was proposed by the group and is provided at the end of this paper.