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The Fourth ECMI Conference on Industrial Mathematics took place at Strobl in Aus­ tria, May 29-June 2, 1989. The conference was devoted to the exchange of ideas, models and methods from various fields of industrial applications of mathematics. About 140 people from 21 countries attended the meeting. The aim was to bring together peo­ ple from industry and from university. In this respect the organizers were only partly successful!. The participance of about 20 people from industry shows that there is still much work to be done to increase the acceptance from this side. 72 speakers presented their results as invited or contributed lectures, or in the frame of 2 minisymposia. One minisymposium was organized by Heinz W. Engl and focused on steel processing, the other one, organized by Hansjorg Wacker, dealt with chemical engineering. These proceedings consist of 56 papers. The articles within each of the sections: Invited Lectures, Minisymposium Steel Processing, Minisymposium Chemical Engi­ neering, and Contributed Lectures are in alphabetical order of the first author. Exept for the contributions to the minisymposia, which clearly concentrate on the corre­ sponding topics, it is hard to find a reasonable classification of the papers . This, we believe, is typical for industrial mathematics and underlines the vast variety of fields where mathematics could be used to support problem solving. We would like to acknowlegde the valuable work of the referees of the articles who certainly helped to improve the quality of this volume.

"Mathematics in Industry" - since the volume containing the proceedings of the 1985 Oberwolfach conference was published*), this subject has become more fashionable in Europe, America and also in the third world. The Europeans have come closer to each other: They formed a European Consortium for Mathematics in Industry, abbreviated ECMI. This ECMI supported mainly by mathematicians from Amsterdam, Bari, Eindhoven, Firenze, Kaiserslautem, Limerick, Linz, Paris, Oxford and Trondheim has become a legal entity with a rapidly growing number of members. It has organized a common, really European postgraduate programme, establishes contact between industry and universities and organizes other confer­ ences everywhere in the world. Industrial mathematics is a special method to get interesting problems; a special attitude of curiosity for technical or economical questions; a general rather broad knowledge in all branches of mathematics; but it always remains real mathematics. Our first proceedings contained many articles about "why and how to start". Now we are more selfconfident about our ideas: These proceedings include only exam­ ples of "how to do". It is a pleasure to see how many different kinds of good mathematics are applied to so many different problems from industry. Part of the selection criteria for this volume was that some of the applications of what is usually considered ivory tower mathematics be represented.