Book excerpt: This volume contains the refereed proceedings of the special session on Optimization and Nonlinear Analysis held at the Joint American Mathematical Society-Israel Mathematical Union Meeting which took place at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in May 1995. Most of the papers in this book originated from the lectures delivered at this special session. In addition, some participants who didn't present lectures and invited speakers who were unable to attend contributed their work. The fields of optimization theory and nonlinear analysis continue to be very active. This book presents not only the wide spectrum and diversity of the results, but also their manifold connections to other areas, such as differential equations, functional analysis, operator theory, calculus of variations, numerical analysis, and mathematical programming. In reading this book one encounters papers that deal, for example, with convex, quasiconvex and generalized convex functions, fixed and periodic points, fractional-linear transformations, moduli of convexity, monontone operators, Morse lemmas, Navier-Stokes equations, nonexpansive maps, nonsmooth analysis, numerical stability, products of projections, steepest descent, the Leray-Schauder degree, the turnpike property, and variational inequalities.