Intro
The Dynamical Systems Group of the Region of Murcia started work back in 1987, the year F. Balibrea Gallego first taught a post-graduate course on the subject in the University of Murcia. It has had stable financing since 1995 and today it gathers researchers from the University of Murcia, Polytechnic University of Cartagena, Miguel Hernández University from Elche and Castilla-La Mancha University, together with some prestigious foreign researchers. Two decades after its creation it had already produced 23 PhD theses and 17 undergraduate theses, it had organized or participated in 9 international conferences and 8 national conferences, and had published more than 250 research papers and 13 books. It is one of the member groups of the DANCE Network, which draws together practically every Spanish research group on Dynamical Systems (see www.dance-net.org), and organized one of its biannual meetings in September 2004 in La Manga del Mar Menor (Murcia, Spain).
In these more than two decades of work the group has studied very diverse aspects of dynamics, both discrete and continuous. With regard to the former, we have investigated, among other things, chaos in the Li-Yorke sense, periodic structure, topological as well as metric entropy, symbolic and combinatorial differentiable dynamics, triangular and antitriangular maps, omega-limit sets, time series, bifurcation theories, and difference equations. In the continuous aspect, we have focused mainly on the qualitative theory of flows on surfaces, the control of chaotic escape, the search for global compact attractors in infinite dimensional systems, the creation of numerical algorithms for solving differential equations and hamiltonian mechanics.