The special issue contains contributions presented at the international
workshop Seismic waves in laterally inhomo- geneous media IV, which was
held at the Castle of Trest, Czech Republic, May 22-27, 1995. The
workshop, which was attended by about 100 seismologists from more than
10 countries, was devoted mainly to the current state of theoretical and
computational means of study of seismic wave propagation in complex
structures. The special issue can be of interest for theoretical, global
and explorational seismologists. The first part contains papers dealing
with the study and the use of various methods of solving forward and
inverse problems in complicated structures. Among other methods,
discrete-wave number method, the finite-difference method, the edge-wave
supperposition method and the ray method are studied and used. Most
papers contained in the second part are related to the ray method. The
most important topics are two-point ray tracing, grid calculations of
travel times and amplitudes and seismic wave propagation in anisotropic
media.