The Society for the Foundations of Computational Mathematics supports fundamental research in computational mathematics and its applications, interpreted in the broadest sense. As part of its endeavour to promote research across a wide spectrum of subjects concerned with computation, the Society regularly organises conferences and specialist workshops which bring together leading researchers working in diverse fields that impinge on various aspects of computation. Major conferences of the Society were held in Park City (1995), Rio de Janeiro (1997), Oxford (1999), and Minneapolis (2002).

The next FoCM conference will take place at the University of Santander in Spain in July 2005. More information about FoCM is available from the website http://www.focm.net.

The conference in Minneapolis on 5-14 August 2002 was attended by several hundred scientists. Workshops were held in eighteen fields which included: the foundations of the numerical solution of partial differential equations, geometric integration and computational mechanics, learning theory, optimization, special functions, approximation theory, computational algebraic geometry, computational number theory, multiresolution and adaptivity, numerical linear algebra, quantum computing, computational dynamics, geometrical modelling and animation, image and signal processing, stochastic computation, symbolic analysis, complexity and information-based complexity theory. In addition to the workshops, eighteen plenary lectures, concerned with a broad spectrum of topics connected to computational mathematics, were delivered by some of the world's foremost researchers. This volume is a collection of articles, based on the plenary talks presented at FoCM 2002.