Book excerpt: The intellectual center of this proceedings volume is the subject of conservation laws. Conservation laws are the most basic model of many continuum processes, and for this reason they govern the motion of fluids, solids, and plasma. They are basic to the understanding of more complex modeling issues, such as multiphase flow, chemically reacting flow, and non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Equations of this type also arise in novel and unexpected areas, such as the pattern recognition and image processing problem of edge enhancement and detection. The articles in this volume address the entire range of the study of conservation laws, including the fundamental mathematical theory, familiar and novel applications, and the numerical problem of finding effective computational algorithms for the solution of these problems.