The first ten papers in this issue are based on scientific research presented at the International Conference on Mathematics in (bio)Chemical Kinetics and Engineering (MaCKiE) 2017, which was held between May 25 and 27, 2017 in Budapest. This was the seventh event of the MaCKiE series, with previous meetings in Ghent, Belgium (2002, 2009, 2015), Houston, USA (2007), Heidelberg, Germany (2011), and Chennai, India (2013).

The meeting aimed to bring together biologists, chemists, chemical engineers, physicists and mathematicians from all over the world with a special interest in the application of advanced mathematical methods to describe kinetic phenomena. MaCKiE 2017 was attended by 70 participants from 30 countries from Chile to Japan. The six keynote lectures were delivered from a diverse set of invited speakers: Vladana Vukojevic (Sweden), Vemuri Balakotaiah (USA), Laurence Calzone (France), Daishin Ueyama (Japan), Karl Heinz Hoffmann (Germany), István Z. Kiss (USA). These were complemented by 46 further oral lectures, while the poster session featured 15 presentations.

At the end of the event, János Tóth (Hungary) received the MaCKiE Lifetime Achievement Award and also delivered the final presentation of the meeting with reflections on the scientific issues brought up by the participants.

Although the field of mathematical kinetics is represented in Reaction Kinetics, Mechanisms and Catalysis only occasionally, it was a notable co-incidence that during the preparation of these special issue papers, 12 additional manuscripts were accepted for publication that would have fitted well into the scientific program of MaCKiE 2017. So these papers are also included in the present issue. I have always held the opinion that fully quantitative data evaluation does not receive its proper emphasis or recognition in today’s chemistry. This is why I am very happy to present this special issue to the readers: I hope that, at least in a modest way, it will help convince more of the researchers working in the field this sort of analysis is not luxury in chemistry, but a necessity.

The next MaCKiE meeting is scheduled in Ghent, Belgium at the end of 2018. MaCKiE-2018 will be held November 8–9, 2018 (http://conf.nsc.ru/mackie2018/en/invitation).

Gábor Lente

Editor-in-Chief