The conference, organised by the Society for Foundations of Computational Mathematics, is fifth in a sequence that commenced with the Park City, Rio de Janeiro, Oxford and Minneapolis FoCM meetings. The format of the conference will be similar: plenary invited lectures in the mornings, theme-centred parallel workshops in the afternoons. Each workshop extends over three days and the conference will consist of three `periods', comprising of different themes. Some participants chose to attend just one or two `periods' but, on past experience, the greatest benefit followed from attending the conference for its entire ten days.

The choice of speakers in a workshop is the responsibility of workshop organisers. Many (but by no means all) workshop talks will be by invitation.

We have every intention to build upon previous FoCM conferences and to make FoCM05 into a unique meeting point of workers in computational mathematics and of theoreticians in mathematics and in computer sciences. While presenting plenary talks by foremost world authorities and maintaining the highest technical level in the workshops, the emphasis, like in Park City, Rio de Janeiro, Oxford and Minneapolis, will be on multidisciplinary interaction across subjects and disciplines, in an informal and friendly atmosphere. We hope that it will be an opportunity to meet colleagues from different subject-areas and identify the wide-ranging (and often surprising) common denominator to our research.