Introduction

Summary

An international conference ‘Groups 1993 Galway / St Andrews’ was held at University College, Galway, Ireland during the period 1 to 14 August 1993. This followed in the main the successful format developed in 1981, 1985 and 1989 by C M Campbell and E F Robertson. They invited T Hurley, S Tobin and J Ward to join them and continue the series in 1993 in Galway. Serious planning got under way when the five organisers met at a Warwick conference in March 1991, and decided to invite as principal speakers J L Alperin (Chicago), M Broué (Paris), P H Kropholler (London), A Lubotzky (Jerusalem) and E I Zel'manov (Madison). All of these agreed to give courses of about five lectures each, and articles based on these courses form a valuable part of these Proceedings - particularly so as in some cases they are strongly complementary in subject matter. Also, as it transpired, one speaker was awarded a Fields Medal exactly one year later at the 1994 ICM in Zurich; the organisers have great pleasure in congratulating Professor Zel'manov most heartily - and hope perhaps that this may augur well for future speakers in the series!

An invitation to J Neubüser (Aachen) to arrange a workshop on Computational Group Theory and the use of GAP was taken up so enthusiastically by him that the workshop became eflFectively a fully-fledged parallel meeting throughout the second week, with over thirty hours of lectures by experts and with practical sessions organised by M Schönert (Aachen). These Proceedings contain an article by Professor Neubiiser based on a lecture he gave in the first week of the conference.