Rotafest prgramme MacMahon's partition analysis - I the lecture hall partition theorem, George E.Andrews the cd-index of zonotypes and arrangements, Louis J. Billera, Richard Ehrenbor and margar Readdy letter-place methods and homotopy, David A. Buchsbaum classification of trivectors in 6-D space, Wendy Chan parameter augmentation for basic hypergeometric series I, William Y.C. Chen and Zhi-Guo Liu unities and negation, Henry crapo and Claude le conte de Poly-Barbut the would-be meth of targeted rings, ottavio M. D'Antona lattice walks and primary decomposition, Persi diaconis, Dav Eisenbud and Bernd Sturmfels natural exponential families and umbral calculus, A. di Bucchianico a D.E. Loeb umbral calculus in hilbert space, A.di Bucchianico, D.E. Loeb and Gian-Carlo Rota a strategy for determining polynomial orthogonality, J.M. Freeman plethystic formulas and positivity q,t-kosta coefficinets, A.M. Garsia and J. Remmel an alternative evaluation of the Andrews-Burge determinant, C. Krattenthaler the number of points in a combinatorial geometry with no 8-point-line minors, Joseph E. Bonin and Joseph P.S. Kung umbral shifts and symmetric functions of schur type, Miguel A. Mendez an axiomization for cubic algebras, Colin Bailey and Joseph Oliveira an elementar proof of Roichman's rule for irreducible characters of Iwahori-Hecke algebras of type A, Arun Ram universal constructions in umbral calculus, Nigel Ray hyperplane arrangements, parking functions an tree inversions, Richard P. Stanley more orthogonal polynomials as moments, Mourad E.H. Ismail and Dennis Stanton more orthogonal ploynomials as moments, Mourad E.H. Ismail and Dennis Stanton difference equations via the classical umbral calculus, Brian D. Taylor an analogy in geometric homology - rigidity and cofactors on geometric graphs, Walter Whiteley the umbral calculus and identities for hypergeometric functions with special arguments, Jet Wimp apologies to T.S. Eliot - rota nerds, J.S. Yang.

Times are changing: mathematics, once the queen of the sciences and the undisputed recipient of research funds, is now being shoved aside in favor of fields which are (wrongly) presumed to have applications, either because they endow themselves with a catchy terminology, or because they know (better than mathematicians ever did) how to make use of the latest techniques in P.R. The following decalogue was written as a message of warning to a colleague who insisted that all is well and that nothing can happen to us mathematicians as long as we keep proving deep theorems.

What is massively parallel computing and why is it important?, W. Daniel Hillis complex adaptive systems, John H. Holland perspectives on parallel computing, Yuefan Deng et al parallel billiards and monster systems, Brosl Hasslacher first we reshape our computers, then our computers reshape us - the broader intellectual impact of parallelism in conscious experience, Robert Sokolowski of time, intelligence and institutions, Felix E. Browder parallel computing and education, Geoffrey C. Fox the age of computing - a personal memoir, N. Metropolis what should the public know about mathematics?, Philip J. Davis America's economic-technological agenda for the 1990s, Jacob T. Schwartz.

The Computer, one can safely predict, will be adjudged to have been the ultimate technological symbol of our century. Although not nearly as common as a car or a TV set (the runners-up in the race for the ultimate technological symbol), it has affected our views, our attitudes, and our outlook in more subtle and disquieting ways.

Let me begin with the remark, taken from the recent NRC Study "Roles of Industry and University in Computer Research and Development 1," that two basic ideas, namely Babbage's stored program concept and its triumphant transistor/microcircuit implementation, continue after thirty years to drive the computer field as a whole. These ideas have proved so rich in consequence as to ensure the practical success of our field, independent of any other accomplishment. Since, as Turing emphasized, the Babbage/Von Neumann processor is computationally universal, any computational paradigm is accessible to it, so that it can be improved in speed and size only, never in fundamental capability. Nevertheless, the successes of microcircuit technology have enabled computer speed and size to grow in an astounding way, confronting workers in the field with a continually widening range of opportunities. For example, discs have led to databases, communication technology has led to ARPANET, and microchips to interest in distributed computing.