2000 Copper Mountain Conference

The Copper Mountain Conferences, organized annually by the University of Colorado in cooperation with SIAM, focus alternately on multigrid methods and iterative methods. The conferences have built a reputation for the relaxed atmosphere that makes it the place for young researchers to present their ideas and for the older celebrities to listen to so many exciting, often still unpolished, ideas. This development of young researchers is further stimulated by the Student Paper Competition, through which the best work of doctoral students is highlighted. On April 3--7, 2000, we saw the sixth conference in the series on iterative methods, and the research area was as fresh, lively, and inspiring as ever. The Program Committee quickly agreed that it would be very attractive for the entire research community to have the best contributions collected as papers in a special issue of {\em SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing}. We are very grateful to SIAM for graciously accepting our proposal. SIAM handed the responsibility for this special issue to the Program Committee, and those present at the meeting accepted the invitation to act as guest associate editors. The next step was to invite all speakers to submit a paper, which led to 31 submissions. All papers underwent the usual SIAM review process, maintaining the high SIAM standards for acceptance. Eventually, 18 papers were accepted for publication, among them the top 2 in the Student Paper Competition, by Judith Vogel (with Daniel Szyld) and Michiel Hochstenbach. A special thanks should go to all those anonymous referees who helped us meet the deadlines through their very constructive efforts. I consider this a strong sign that we are members of a friendly research family rather than individuals in an impersonal community. The 18 accepted papers are distributed over the following categories: 6 papers related to preconditioning, 6 related to eigenvalue computation, 3 on multigrid techniques, on nonlinear problems, and 1 with a new variant of an iterative method (TQMR). This shows that preconditioning continues to attract much research attention, with many more challenging problems left open rather than being solved. Eigenvalue computation continues to gain more attention after initial emphasis in these conferences on linear systems. We expect that the readers of these papers will enjoy reading them as much as we did and that it will help many of us make further progress in research. We thank all the authors for their efforts to get their papers ready under often very tight time constraints. I thank my colleagues the associate editors for their dedication and help. Above all, we are indebted to Tom Manteuffel and Steve McCormick for organizing such excellent conferences. Guest Associate Editors Iain Duff, Howard Elman, Ronal Freund, Tim Kelley, Seymour Parter, Gerhard Starke, Nick Trefethen, Panayot Vassilevski, Homer Walker, Olof Widlund