To celebrate Peter Huber's 60th birthday in 1994, our university had invited for a festive occasion in the afternoon of Thursday, June 9. The invitation to honour this outstanding personality was followed by about fifty colleagues and former students from, mainly, allover the world. Others, who could not attend, sent their congratulations by mail and e-mail (P. Bickel: " ... It's hard to imagine that Peter turned 60 ... "). After a welcome address by Adalbert Kerber (dean), the following lectures were delivered. Volker Strassen (Konstanz): Almost Sure Primes and Cryptography -an Introduction Frank Hampel (Zurich): On the Philosophical Foundations of Statistics 1 Andreas Buja (Murray Hill): Projections and Sections High-Dimensional Graphics for Data Analysis. The distinguished speakers lauded Peter Huber a hard and fair mathematician, a cooperative and stimulating colleague, and an inspiring and helpful teacher. The Festkolloquium was surrounded with a musical program by the Univer 2 sity's Brass Ensemble. The subsequent Workshop "Robust Statistics, Data Analysis and Computer Intensive Methods" in Schloss Thurnau, Friday until Sunday, June 9-12, was organized about the areas in statistics that Peter Huber himself has markedly shaped. In the time since the conference, most of the contributions could be edited for this volume-a late birthday present-that may give a new impetus to further research in these fields."

1 To the king, my lord, from your servant Balasi: 2 ... The king should have a look. Maybe the scribe who reads to the king did not understand . . . . shall I personally show, with this tablet that I am sending to the king, my lord, how the omen was written. 3 Really, he who has not followed the text with his finger cannot possibly understand it. This book is about optimally robust functionals and their unbiased esti mators and tests. Functionals extend the parameter of the assumed ideal center model to neighborhoods of this model that contain the actual distri bution. The two principal questions are (F): Which functional to choose? and (P): Which statistical procedure to use for the selected functional? Using a local asymptotic framework, we deal with both problems by linking up nonparametric statistical optimality with infinitesimal robust ness criteria. Thus, seemingly separate developments in robust statistics are presented in a unifying way."