Michael Kohlmann - Böcker

In the centenary year of the publication of Bachelier's thesis, what today is considered as the foundation of modern finance, we had the opportunity to invite experts in this relatively new field in mathematics to participate in a meeting at the University of Konstanz, Germany. This could be the place to consider the historical development, but as Professor Girlich presented a remarkable lecture on the past of what now is known as mathematical finance, we refer the reader to the article in this volume. Instead w etak e the opportunity to express our thanks to those colleagues who made this workshop possible: to Professor Sondermann, University of Bonn, Ger- many, who in a sense initiated the idea, to our friends Mark Davis, Robert Elliott, and Xun Yu Zhou, whose advices were extremely helpful in establishing the pro- gram of the conference, and to the invited lecturers Nicole EI Karoui, Ec khard Platen, and Stan Pliska for carefully preparing their lectures. Also w egratefully appreciate our students' help during the conference and Mrs Weisser's successful efforts in providing our guests with visa and hotel reservations.Last we should mention the students of the business department who organized a great conference dinner on Mainau island and who documented the meeting in a lot of photos. Finally we thank our wives Evi and Jie for giving us leave from home (-v.ork) to organize the conference.

The 4th Bad Honnef Conference on Stochastic Differential Systems highlighted recent advances in the areas of stochastic control and filtering theory as well as stochastic analysis. Special emphasis was put on the use of adaptive methods in stochastic systems analysis and on the theory of random fields, both very active fields of current research. There were six survey lectures, two of them on adaptive control of linear stochastic systems (Kumar, Lai), two on problems in stochastic analysis and random fields, (Surgailis, Wong) and one on singular perturbations in nonlinear filtering (Bensoussan). In addition, 37 research papers pertaining to the main topics of the conference were presented.