The contributions of these eProceedings are presented at the eighth International Mathematica Symposium (IMS'06) organized in June 2006 in France in the "Palais des Papes" of Avignon, next to the celebrated "pont St Benezet", two monuments inscribed by UNESCO on the World Heritage List, together with the "Rocher des Doms". This conference is the first french occurrence of this series of interdisciplinary conferences dedicated to application of Mathematica, an initiative to promote scientific research and exchange in the broad community of enthousiastic users of this computational environment.

This symposium is of interest to researchers, teachers and doctoral students, but it addresses the academic community as well as the industrial sphere or the world of arts. It is devoted to a broad set of topics: pure and applied mathematics, algorithms and computer algebra, theoretical and applied computer sciences, physics, complexity analysis, biology and life sciences, human sciences, engineering, economy and finance, graphics and design, visual arts and music, education, ...

More than a hundred abstracts have been submitted. After a careful review, the Program Committee invited most of the authors to submit full papers. Each of these papers has been thoroughly reviewed by two independent reviewers and 64 were recommended for presentation and publication in the electronic proceedings, published as a CD with ISBN and accessible online at //hal.inria.fr/IMS06.

The editors are grateful to the authors of the papers for their valuable contribution. We are indebted to the reviewers, the members of the Program Committee, who spent a lot of time for their thoughtful review.
We are grateful too to all the people who helped in organizing this event, especially to the members of the "Association pour l'Organisation d'International Mathematica Symposium 2006" and to our local administrative officer, Monique Simonetti.
We want to thank all the sponsors of IMS'06: Sophia Antipolis research unit of INRIA provided technical and financial support to the local organization, City of Avignon organized the Monday's reception and showed the support of the city for this event, AMD and Apple Computer made highly powerful computers available for workshops.

We think that this symposium respects the tradition of excellence that has been the rule for International Mathematica Symposiums. We are confident that it will promote and strengthen the wide potential of research and application of Mathematica.

Bruno Autin, General Chair
Yves Papegay, Program Chair