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.

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.