all from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing; Feng-Shan Bai, Tsinghua University; Xing-Ping Liu, Beijing Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics; and Shu-Fang Xu, Peking University.It was the purpose of the conference to gather experts in Numerical Algebra and Scientific Computing from Asia, Europe, and the United States to present and exchange new ideas, as well as to discuss future developments. The talks display the present activity in these areas and illustrate the diversity of the ongoing research. The topics discussed include iterative methods for the solution of large systems of linear equations, direct solution methods for large sparse systems of linear equations, the solution of large systems of nonlinear equations, multigrid methods, preconditioning, iterative methods for ill-posed problems, least-squares problems, eigenvalue problems, inverse eigenvalue problems, structured matrix problems, model reduction, perturbation analysis, as well as parallel computing. Applications to computational fluid dynamics, control theory, image restoration, thermal conduction, and queuing theory were presented.We are happy to have been able to secure manuscripts at the leading edge of research on numerical algebra and scientific computing from some of the speakers at the conference, and we hope that readers of this issue will enjoy the contributions as much as we have. We would like to thank Professor Luc Wuytack, one of the editors of the journal, for agreeing to the publication of this special issue.
