Book excerpt: This Festschrift is a collection of articles contributed by colleagues, collaborators and past students to honor Professor John T. Katsikadelis on the occasion of his 70 years. Professor Katsikadelis, now an emeritus professor at the National Technical University of Athens in Greece, is one of the BEM pioneers who started his research in this field with his PhD thesis at the Polytechnic Institute of New York in the 1970s and continued it to date.The book comprises 26 contributions by more than 50 leading researchers in Boundary Element Methods (BEM) and other Mesh Reduction Methods (MRM). All contributors are well-known scientists from Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America. The volume is essentially a collection of both original and review articles covering a variety of research topics in the areas of solid mechanics, fluid mechanics, potential theory, composite materials, fracture mechanics, damage mechanics, plasticity, heat transfer, dynamics and vibrations and soil-structure interaction. Invaluable to scientists, engineers and other professionals interested in the latest developments of the boundary integral equation methods, it addresses the needs of the BEM computational mechanics research community.The book is written for: researchers in academia and industry and graduate students focusing on solid and fluid mechanics as used in civil, mechanical and aerospace engineering.