This book contains a collection of articles corresponding to some of the talks delivered at the Foundations of Computational Mathematics conference held at IMPA in Rio de Janeiro in January 1997. Some ofthe others are published in the December 1996 issue of the Journal of Complexity. Both of these publications were available and distributed at the meeting. Even in this aspect we hope to have achieved a synthesis of the mathematics and computer science cultures as well as of the disciplines. The reaction to the Park City meeting on Mathematics of Numerical Analy sis: Real Number Algorithms which was chaired by Steve Smale and had around 275 participants, was very enthusiastic. At the suggestion of Narendra Karmar mar a lunch time meeting of Felipe Cucker, Arieh Iserles, Narendra Karmarkar, Jim Renegar, Mike Shub and Steve Smale decided to try to hold a periodic meeting entitled "Foundations of Computational Mathematics" and to form an organization with the same name whose primary purpose will be to hold the meeting. This is then the first edition of FoCM as such. It has been organized around a small collection of workshops, namely - Systems of algebraic equations and computational algebraic geometry - Homotopy methods and real machines - Information-based complexity - Numerical linear algebra - Approximation and PDEs - Optimization - Differential equations and dynamical systems - Relations to computer science - Vision and related computational tools There were also twelve plenary speakers.
