FOREWORD BY THE EDITORS

Abstract

The Tenth International Conference on Recent Progess in Many-Body Theories was held at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA, over the period 1015 September 1999. During the meeting some 37 invited papers were presented orally, and approximately 65 contributed papers were given as posters. All of the invited speakers were requested to submit a paper for these Proceedings, and the Editors are grateful to the large majority, some 30, who were able to do so by the tight deadline imposed. Since the quality of the contributed papers was so high, the Editors have decided to include a selection of them in these Proceedings. Accordingly, we invited some 25 of the poster presenters to submit an article, and we have also incorporated these into the present volume. The Editors are extremely grateful to the rapporteurs of the two poster sessions, Sandy Fetter and John Negele, for their suggestions and advice in making the selection. However, the final decision on which contributed papers to include was made by the Editors, whose sole responsibility it remains. We are only too aware that, for reasons of space, we were obliged to omit many other interesting presented papers. We offer our apologies to the authors of those papers not selected, many of which were equally worthy of inclusion. In order to facilitate the usefulness of this book, related articles have been grouped by the Editors under a number of headings chosen by them. While these broadly reflect the themes of the conference sessions, we have not followed them exactly. In particular, the articles do not follow the same sequence as their presentation at the meeting. We are keenly aware that the classification scheme, and the grouping of the articles within it that we have adopted, are somewhat arbitrary. In particular, many articles would sit comfortably under more than one heading. The interested reader should not, therefore, follow the scheme too slavishly. Finally, we thank all of the contributors for the extremely high quality of the articles. We feel confident that the present volume will live up to the high standards set by earlier proceedings in this series.