The International Symposium on Computational & Applied PDEs was held at Zhangjiajie National Park of China from July 1-7, 2001. The main goal of this conference is to bring together computational, applied and pure mathematicians on different aspects of partial differential equations to exchange ideas and to promote collaboration. Indeed, it attracted a number of leading scientists in computational PDEs including Doug Arnold (Minnesota), Jim Bramble (Texas A & M), Achi Brandt (Weizmann), Franco Brezzi (Pavia), Tony Chan (UCLA), Shiyi Chen (John Hopkins), Qun Lin (Chinese Academy of Sciences), Mitch Luskin (Minnesota), Tom Manteuffel (Colorado), Peter Markowich (Vienna), Mary Wheeler (Texas Austin) and Jinchao Xu (Penn State); in applied and theoretical PDEs including Weinan E (Princeton), Shi Jin (Wisconsin), Daqian Li (Fudan) and Gang Tian (MIT). It also drew an international audience of size 100 from Austria, China, Germany, Hong Kong, Iseael, Italy, Singapore and the United States. The conference was organized by Yunqing Huang of Xiangtan University, Jinchao Xu of Penn State University, and Tony Chan of UCLA through ICAM (Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics) of Xiangtan university which was founded in January 1997 and directed by Jinchao Xu. The scientific committee of this conference consisted of Randy Bank of UCSD, Tony Chan of UCLA, K. C.