"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.

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.

The ENUMATH conferences were established in 1995 in order to provide a forum for discussion on recent topics of numerical mathematics. They seek to bring together leading experts and young scientists, with special emphasis on contributions from Europe.In the second ENUMATH conference in 1997, recent results and new trends in the analysis of numerical algorithms as well as their application to challenging scientific and industrial problems were discussed. Apart from theoretical aspects, a major part of the conference was devoted to numerical methods in interdisciplinary applications.The topics covered in this proceedings include: higher order finite element methods, non-matching grids, least-squares methods for partial differential equations, multiscale analysis, boundary element method, optimization in partial differential equations, solid mechanics, microstructures, computational fluid dynamics, computational electrodynamics and semiconductors.

This volume contains papers presented at the 2nd International Afro-European Conference for Industrial Advancement -- AECIA 2015. The conference aimed at bringing together the foremost experts and excellent young researchers from Africa, Europe and the rest of the world to disseminate the latest results from various fields of engineering, information, and communication technologies. The topics, discussed at the conference, covered a broad range of domains spanning from ICT and engineering to prediction, modeling, and analysis of complex systems. The 2015 edition of AECIA featured a distinguished special track on prediction, modeling and analysis of complex systems -- Nostradamus, and special sessions on Advances in Image Processing and Colorization and Data Processing, Protocols, and Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks.

This IMA Volume in Mathematics and its Applications VARIATIONAL AND FREE BOUNDARY PROBLEMS is based on the proceedings of a workshop which was an integral part of the 1990- 91 IMA program on "Phase Transitions and Free Boundaries. " The aim of the workshop was to highlight new methods, directions and problems in variational and free boundary theory, with a concentration on novel applications of variational methods to applied problems. We thank R. Fosdick, M. E. Gurtin, W. -M. Ni and L. A. Peletier for organizing the year-long program and, especially, J. Sprock for co-organizing the meeting and co-editing these proceedings. We also take this opportunity to thank the National Science Foundation whose financial support made the workshop possible. Avner Friedman Willard Miller, Jr. PREFACE In a free boundary one seeks to find a solution u to a partial differential equation in a domain, a part r of its boundary of which is unknown. Thus both u and r must be determined. In addition to the standard boundary conditions on the un known domain, an additional condition must be prescribed on the free boundary. A classical example is the Stefan problem of melting of ice; here the temperature sat isfies the heat equation in the water region, and yet this region itself (or rather the ice-water interface) is unknown and must be determined together with the tempera ture within the water. Some free boundary problems lend themselves to variational formulation.

The European Consortium for Mathematics in Industry (ECMI) was founded, largely due to the driving energy of Michiel Hazewinkel on the 14th April, 1986 in Neustadt-Mussbach in West Germany. The founder signatories were A. Bensoussan (INRIA, Paris), A. Fasano (University of Florence), M. Hazewinkel (CWI, Amsterdam), M. Heilio (Lappeenranta University, Finland), F. Hodnett (University of Limerick, Ireland), H. Martens (Norwegian Institute of Technology, Trondheim), S. McKee (University of Strathclyde, Scotland), H. NeURzert (University of Kaiserslautern, Germany), D. Sundstrom (The Swedish Institute of Applied Mathematics, Stockholm), A. Tayler (University of Oxford, England) and Hj. Wacker (University of Linz, Austria). The European Consortium for Mathematics in Industry is dedicated to: (a) promote the use of mathematical models in Industry (b) educate industrial mathematicians to meet the growing demand for such experts (c) operate on a European scale. ECMI is still a young organisation but its membership is growing fast. Although it has still to persuade more industrialists to join, ECMI certainly operates on a European scale and a flourishing postgraduate programme with student exchange has been underway for some time. It is perhaps fitting that the first open meeting of ECMI was held at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Glasgow is and was the industrial capital of Scotland and was, and arguably still is, Britain's second city after London; when this volume appears it will have rightly donned the mantle of the cultural capital of Europe.