The Eighth EPSRC Numerical Analysis Summer School was held at the Uni- versity of Leicester from the 5th to the 17th of July, 1998. This was the third Numerical Analysis Summer School to be held in Leicester. The previous meetings, in 1992 and 1994, had been carefully structured to ensure that each week had a coherent 'theme'. For the 1998 meeting, in order to widen the audience, we decided to relax this constraint. Speakers were chosen to cover what may appear, at first sight, to be quite diverse areas of numeri- cal analysis. However, we were pleased with the extent to which the ideas...