Book excerpt: This IMA Volume in Mathematics and its Applications COMPUTER AIDED PROOFS IN ANALYSIS is based on the proceedings of an IMA Participating Institutions (PI) Conference held at the University of Cincinnati in April 1989. Each year the 19 Participating Institutions select, through a competitive process, several conferences proposals from the PIs, for partial funding. This conference brought together leading figures in a number of fields who were interested in finding exact answers to problems in analysis through computer methods. We thank Kenneth Meyer and Dieter Schmidt for organizing the meeting and editing the proceedings. A vner Friedman Willard Miller, Jr. PREFACE Since the dawn of the computer revolution the vast majority of scientific compu tation has dealt with finding approximate solutions of equations. However, during this time there has been a small cadre seeking precise solutions of equations and rigorous proofs of mathematical results. For example, number theory and combina torics have a long history of computer-assisted proofs; such methods are now well established in these fields. In analysis the use of computers to obtain exact results has been fragmented into several schools.