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.