The IMA Workshop on Evolutionary Algorithms brought together many researchers in the area of evolutionary computation for a week of interaction. The field of evolutionary computation has developed since the 1960s and in the late 1990s consists of a variety of subfields such as genetic algorithms, evolution strategies, evolutionary programming, and genetic programming, each with its own algorithmic perspectives and goals. The workshop did a great deal to clarify the state of the theory of evolutionary algorithms. The existing theory might be characterized as deriving from two principal...

This IMA Volume in Mathematics and its Applications EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHMS is based on the proceedings of a workshop that was an integral part of the 1996-97 IMA program on "MATHEMATICS IN HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTING." I thank Lawrence David Davis (Tica Associates), Kenneth De Jong (Computer Science, George Mason University), Michael D. Vose (Computer Science, The University of Tennessee), and L. Darrell Whitley (Computer Science, Colorado State University) for their excellent work in organizing the workshop and for editing the proceedings. Further appreciation is ex- tended to Donald G....