The Sixth International Conference on Representations of Algebras was held at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, in August 1992. This refereed volume contains papers presented at the conference, as well as a number of papers submitted after the conference. Describing developments at the forefront of the field, this book will be of interest to algebraists working in the field of representation theory.

This book contains selected papers from the international conference 'Groups - St Andrews 1981', which was held at the University of St Andrews in July/August 1981. Its contents reflect the main topics of the conference: combinatorial group theory; infinite groups; general groups, finite or infinite; computational group theory. Four courses, each providing a five-lecture survey, given by J. Neubuser (Aachen), D. J. S. Robinson (Illinois), S. J. Tobin (Galway) and J. Wiengold (Cardiff), have been expanded into articles, forming the first part of the book. The second part consists of surveys and research articles written by other conference participants. More than two-thirds of the book is composed of survey articles providing a remarkably clear and up-to-date picture of those areas of group theory. The articles which comprise this book, together with their extensive bibliographies, will prove an invaluable tool to researchers in group theory, and, in addition, their detailed expositions make them very suitable for relevant postgraduate courses.

This volume presents a short guide to the extensive literature concerning semir ings along with a complete bibliography. The literature has been created over many years, in variety of languages, by authors representing different schools of mathematics and working in various related fields. In many instances the terminology used is not universal, which further compounds the difficulty of locating pertinent sources even in this age of the Internet and electronic dis semination of research results. So far there has been no single reference that could guide the interested scholar or student to the relevant publications. This book is an attempt to fill this gap. My interest in the theory of semirings began in the early sixties, when to gether with Bogdan W ~glorz I tried to investigate some algebraic aspects of compactifications of topological spaces, semirings of semicontinuous functions, and the general ideal theory for special semirings. (Unfortunately, local alge braists in Poland told me at that time that there was nothing interesting in investigating semiring theory because ring theory was still being developed). However, some time later we became aware of some similar investigations hav ing already been done. The theory of semirings has remained "my first love" ever since, and I have been interested in the results in this field that have been appearing in literature (even though I have not been active in this area myself).