‘This is a truly wonderful book, which unfortunately our library is too small to contain.’ -Pierre de Frontage

In the spring of 1993, a 10-day workshop was held at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, under the auspices of the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences, on Geometric and Combinatorial Methods in Group Theory. This volume contains papers contributed by participants at the workshop. Some report work presented by the authors in lectures at the conference, and all of them are on topics closely related to the central theme of the conference. Survey articles were kindly contributed by S M Gersten, R I Grigorchuk, P H Kropholler, A Lubotzky, A A Razborov and E Zelmanov, who were among the invited conference speakers.

The problem section at the end of the book is made up of problems presented at a problem session on the final day of the conference. The session was chaired by S J Pride, and the list was compiled using notes taken by S Wreth together with written comments from the presenters of the problems.

The editors are deeply indebted to V Metaftsis and S Wreth for their invaluable assistance in the running of the conference. We could not have succeeded without their help. In addition, we are grateful to the many other people who helped to make the conference a success.