The collection of papers in this volume represents recent advances in
the under- standing of the geometry and topology of singularities. The
book covers a broad range of topics which are in the focus of
contemporary singularity theory. Its idea emerged during two
Singularities workshops held at the University of Lille (USTL) in 1999
and 2000. Due to the breadth of singularity theory, a single volume can
hardly give the complete picture of today's progress. Nevertheless, this
collection of papers provides a good snapshot of what is the state of
affairs in the field, at the turn of the century. Several papers deal
with global aspects of singularity theory. Classification of fam- ilies
of plane curves with prescribed singularities were among the first
problems in algebraic geometry. Classification of plane cubics was known
to Newton and classification of quartics was achieved by Klein at the
end of the 19th century. The problem of classification of curves of
higher degrees was addressed in numerous works after that. In the paper
by Artal, Carmona and Cogolludo, the authors de- scribe irreducible
sextic curves having a singular point of type An (n > 15) and a large
(Le.: ::: 18) sum of Milnor numbers of other singularities. They have
discov- ered many interesting properties of these families. In
particular they have found new examples of so-called Zariski pairs, i.
e.
