Saddened by the news of Alwyn Scott's death, the editors of Acta Applicandae Mathematicae (ACAP) decided to dedicate to his memory, a special issue of the journal. At the end of 2008 invitation letters were sent to former Al Scott's collaborators and to the international scientific community. They laid out the plan of a volume with focus on several topics Al was involved in: nonlinear diffusion, Josephson (superconducting) transmission lines, coupled anharmonic oscillators, neural systems and biomolecular dynamics. Another publication project was then underway ([1]; solitons in biology) but ACAP editors felt that it had a more limited scope. The special issue planned by ACAP aimed to reach out to a variety of fields and communicate across disciplines; it did not wish to place limitations on what prospective authors might have felt important, and it encouraged submission of both research articles and review articles as a mix. While positive feedback was received from colleagues, the project has been delayed for couple of years due to unforseen events. It is a pleasure to announce now its completion and to see it in final publication form.Alwyn Scott was an editor for Acta Applicandae Mathematicae from the beginning. The founding editor of ACAP was Michiel Hazewinkel and the first journal issue appeared in 1983. Alwyn Scott and one of the present editors (Palle Jorgensen), were part of this event. Jorgensen recalls how Alwyn, and the other members of the initial editorial board, shared Michiel's vision for the journal. At the time, over the phone and in wider mathematical circles, Michiel vigorously articulated and promoted his ideas and willingness to take risks in nurturing a forward looking and truly interdisciplinary journal. The nineteen-eighties were a period witnessing solutions of deep problems in mathematics. At the same time, an increased distance between mathematics and its applications could be sensed. Back then, and perhaps even today, one sees trends in mathematics with increasing specialization (overspecialization); a tendency for researchers to narrow their focus, specialist authors to write