In this volume, I have collected several papers which were presented at the international conference called "Venice-2/Symposium on Applied and In dustrial Mathematics". Such a conference was held in Venice, Italy, between June 11 and 16,1998, and was intended as the follow-up of the very successful similar event (called "Venice-1/Symposium on Applied and Industrial Math ematics"), that was also organized in Venice in October 1989. The Venice-1 conference ended up with a Kluwer volume like this one. I am grateful to Kluwer for having accepted to publish the present volume, the aim of which is to update somehow the state-of-the-art in the field of Ap plied Mathematics as well as in that of the nowadays rather more developed area of Industrial Mathematics. The most of the invited (key-note) speakers contributed to this volume with a paper related to their talk. There are, in addition·, a few significant contributed papers, selected on the basis of their quality and relevance to the present-time research activities. The topics considered in the conference range from rather general sub jects in applied and numerical analysis, to more specialized subjects such as polymers and disordered media, granular flow, semiconductor mathematics, superconductors, elasticity, tomography and other inverse problems, financial modeling, photographic sciences, etc. The papers collected in this volume provide a selection of them. It is clear from the previous list that some attention has been paid to relatively new and emerging fields.
