The present volume contains the proceedings of the workshop on "Minimax Theory and Applications" that was held during the week 30 September - 6 October 1996 at the "G. Stampacchia" International School of Mathematics of the "E. Majorana" Centre for Scientific Cul- ture in Erice (Italy) . The main theme of the workshop was minimax theory in its most classical meaning. That is to say, given a real-valued function f on a product space X x Y, one tries to find conditions that ensure the validity of the equality sup inf f(x, y) = inf sup f(x, y). yEY xEX xEX yEY This is not an appropriate place to...