Between August 6-9 was held the Pucón Symposium 2009: Advanced Mathematical Tools for Frontier Astronomy at the Villarrica Park Lake Hotel, near Pucón (Región de la Araucanía), Chile.

The Pucón Symposium 2009 was a workshop conference focused on the advanced mathematical tools as well as the engineering and technological aspects involved in frontier optical and radio astronomy, including ultra-high speed networking, e-science/grids/high performance computing, data storage/processing/ archiving, data imaging, robotic telescopes, data mining, search engines, time series and automatic classification, virtual observatories, remote astronomy and optimal scheduling.

During the last two decades, many important new telescope facilities have been installed in Chile, among them Gemini-South and SOAR (AURA/NOAO-USA) and VLT Paranal (ESO). Together with the extensive existing facilities, these have created a unique astronomy infrastructure which has triggered the planning and construction of a wide range of major next-generation optical and radio astronomy facilities. Prominent among these latest projects are the ALMA Observatory (currently under construction) and the LSST Project, which will bring a new frontier of technology requirements for data flow management. In fact, the sensing, transmission, process, analysis, storage and archiving of tera- and peta-range volumes of data that these new facilities will need require a robust set of interdisciplinary skills and this seems the right moment to develop them.

Within this context, organizing a special topical meeting in southern Chile’s lake district, the Pucón Symposium 2009, offered a unique opportunity to address and discuss many of the relevant technical and business issues behind the emerging “Advanced Mathematical Tools for Frontier Astronomy”. Our intention was to bring together people from various engineering, technical and scientific disciplines from different R&D organizations with an established tradition of international collaboration, in a special academic and scenic environment, where we analyzed in depth our current activities and discussed in detail our possible future ones.

Download the Symposium 2009 program here.