1 Industrial Mathematics in Linz The Johannes-Kepler-University is situated in Linz, which is the industrial center of Austria. This location provides unique opportunities for cooperation between in dustry and a university which derives its name from one of the most eminent ap plied mathematicians of all times. The mathematics department was founded in the late Sixties, the first students graduated in 1974. In these boom times, they had no problems of finding jobs in industry. However, their employers were then more interested in their general training than in their specific mathematical skills. To change this, the department decided to actively seek cooperation with industry in what we called "problem seminars," where students were trained to solve (under guidance) real-world problems from local industry. Groundwork was already laid by a curriculum with special emphasis on numerical analysis, statistics, and optim ization. This work in problem seminars usually evolved into diploma theses. Inci dentally, in all projects presented here, students were involved at some stages. While the original motivation for cooperation with industry was educational, it turned out that most problems presented to us also led to interesting mathematical problems, so that nowadays our motivation is as much scientific as educational. When cooperating with industry, one cannot expect that the problems to be solved fall into one's special mathematical interest.

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."