1 2 Jean-Dominique Deuschel and Andreas Greven 1 Fakult. at II - Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften, Institut fur .. Mathematik, Technische Universit. at Berlin, Strasse des 17. Juni 136, D-10623 Berlin Tel. (0049 30) 314-25193, Fax: (0049 30) 314-21695 deuschel@math. tu-berlin. de 2 1 Mathematisches Institut, Bismarckstr. 1 , D-91054 Erlangen, 2 Tel. (0049 9131) 85-22454, Fax (0049 9131) 85-26214 This volume collects original work and reviews on work in the ?eld of pro- bilitywhichtookplacewithintheframeworkoftheDFG-Schwerpunkt:Int- acting stochastic systems of high complexity. This research network started in May 1997 and was funded till May 2003. In this network between 20-30 (depending on the 2-year periods of grant renewal) groups from probab- ity, statistical physics and mathematical statistics within Germany were - tive. An extensive international collaboration was an essential part of this network and here particularly intense contacts were built up between the DFG-Schwerpunkt and EURANDOM, a European institute for research in stochastics, which was founded in 1997. This partnership reached from joint workshops and colloquia to collaborations on speci?c projects.
The key scienti?c idea which was behind the research network was to - plore and develop the connections between research in in?nite dimensional stochastic analysis, statistical physics (Gibbs measures, random media), s- tial population models from mathematical biology, complex models of ?n- cial markets or of stochastic models with interacting components in other sciences as for example in climatology.