Book excerpt: This book is dedicated to Jack Edmonds in appreciation of his ground breaking work that laid the foundations for a broad variety of subsequent results achieved in combinatorial optimization. The main part consists of 13 revised full papers on current topics in combinatorial optimization, presented at Aussois 2001, the Fifth Aussois Workshop on Combinatorial Optimization, March 5-9, 2001, and dedicated to Jack Edmonds. Additional highlights in this book are an account of an Aussois 2001 special session dedicated to Jack Edmonds including a speech given by William R. Pulleyblank as well as newly typeset versions of three up-to-now hardly accessible classical papers: - Submodular Functions, Matroids, and Certain Polyhedra by Jack Edmonds - Matching: A Well-Solved Class of Integer Linear Programs by Jack Edmonds and Ellis L. Johnson - Theoretical Improvements in Algorithmic Efficiency for Network Flow Problems by Jack Edmonds and Richard M. Karp.