The EOS Topical Meeting on Electromagnetic Optics, held in Hyères, France, on 7-9 September 1998, was attended by 90 physicists from Belarus, Belgium, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden and USA who work actively in the field of electromagnetic optics. To my knowledge, the meeting was the first one in this field which could be defined as being in the domain of optics (from x-rays to microwaves) where the size or the details of the illuminated object have the same order of magnitude as the wavelength of the incident light. In this domain, most of the approximations used in optics are not relevant and light scattering properties strongly depend on polarization. As a consequence, scattering theories must be based on the fundamental laws of electromagnetism. Topics included scattering by gratings and rough surfaces, diffractive optics, microlenses, photonic band structures, microcavities, thin films, near-field microscopy, nonlinear optics, inverse scattering, surface waves, enhanced backscattering and optical communications. At the meeting 32 lectures and 29 posters were presented on both theoretical and experimental achievements. The active yet relaxed atmosphere of a holiday village on the Côte d'Azur, in a pine forest surrounded by beaches and creeks facing the Porquerolles island, provided a pleasant setting for a very stimulating and rewarding meeting. The success of the meeting can easily be understood: the variety of topics in the domain of electromagnetic optics make it difficult, for instance, in exchanges between specialists in the fields of diffractive optics, near-field optics and photonic band structures; however, there exists a need for such exchanges. From a theoretical or numerical point of view, the modelling processes are very similar to each other and progress in one of these topics may be useful for the whole research community. With regard to the experiments, the experimental devices are often very similar. Thus, most of the attendees came to the conclusion that this first meeting on electromagnetic optics should be followed by many more. The following pages present the contributions of 15 papers to this special issue. We are grateful to the Société Française d'Optique for their support with the financial organization of the meeting. We would also like to acknowledge with thanks the sponsorship of the University of Aix-Marseille, the University of Provence and Jobin-Yvon (Instruments SA).

Daniel Maystre