Dear Friends and Colleagues,

The 10th Vilnius Conference on Probability Theory and Mathematical Statistics is over. Thank you all for your participation and contribution! For almost four decades Vilnius conferences had provided important venue for our science, especially before the collapse of Soviet Union, when the relations between scientists from "East" and "West" were restricted.

The first conference in Vilnius took place in 1973 following every four year with the exception of the 7-th conference held in 1998 in conjunction with the 22-nd European Meeting of Statisticians.

Five conferences were organized during Lithuania's incorporation in Soviet Union, and during these years the role of these conferences was in some sense exceptional - it served as a meeting place for scientists from the so-called socialist countries and western or what we formally called "capitalist" countries. Therefore, the number of participants of Vilnius conferences grew rapidly and almost linearly, starting from approximately 250 participants in the first conference and reaching more than 800 by 1989. When Lithuania regained independence it was challenging to organize the 6th conference in 1993 due to imposed economic sanctions and difficult times in Lithuania - there were several changes of government and the fear that we would not be able to organize the conference. Due to persistence of the late Professor Vytautas Statulevičius, the primary organizer of the first eight conferences, the conference took place and now we had already the 10th.

We hope that the 10th conference, celebrating this small jubilee, provided a forum for the international exchange of knowledge among scientists and gave an impulse for international relations between participants, statistical societies and other scientific organizations.


Prof. Vygantas Paulauskas
Chairman of Organizing Committee