“Technology transfer” has become one of the most well-used phrases of the end of the millennium. The realisation that the worlds of industry and academia cannot fruitfully progress separately has inspired both communities to build strong and mutually beneficial relationships. Often this has meant industry hiring individual professors as consultants, or industry supporting post-doctoral fellows (common in chemistry). An alternative structure has been the utilisation of a quasi-governmental organisation as a go-between, such as NACA/NASA in the US and the Aeronautical Research Council in the UK for work in aeronautics. Direct contact between industry and the mathematics community is more recent, achieving recognition via degree programmes, math-in-industry conferences and journals, all now in a global context. Half of the chapters in this book are products of Study Groups with Industry and Math Clinics, and to some extent the other half derive from similar direct interactions with industry prompted by the successes of these two initiatives.

Study Groups with Industry started in Oxford in 1968 when a small group of applied mathematicians (led by Alan Tayler and Leslie Fox) spent a week problem solving at Oxford University in conjunction with invited representatives from industry. A similar meeting has been held every year since. What has changed in recent years is the global nature of this industrial/academic collaboration. In the first 20 or so years Study Groups with Industry only happened in Oxford, and only once a year: by 1999 meetings running on similar lines to the Oxford model had also taken place in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Holland, Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, USA and other locations, in the same year.