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The present volume contains the proceedings of the workshop on "e;Minimax Theory and Applications"e; that was held during the week 30 September - 6 October 1996 at the "e;G. Stampacchia"e; International School of Mathematics of the "e;E. Majorana"e; Centre for Scientific Cul- ture in Erice (Italy) . The main theme of the workshop was minimax theory in its most classical meaning. That is to say, given a real-valued function f on a product space X x Y , one tries to find conditions that ensure the validity of the equality sup inf f(x,y) = inf sup f(x, y). yEY xEX xEX yEY This is not an appropriate place to enter into the technical details of the proofs of minimax theorems, or into the history of the contribu- tions to the solution of this basic problem in the last 7 decades. But we do want to stress its intrinsic interest and point out that, in spite of its extremely simple formulation, it conceals a great wealth of ideas. This is clearly shown by the large variety of methods and tools that have been used to study it. The applications of minimax theory are also extremely interesting. In fact, the need for the ability to "e;switch quantifiers"e; arises in a seemingly boundless range of different situations. So, the good quality of a minimax theorem can also be judged by its applicability. We hope that this volume will offer a rather complete account of the state of the art of the subject.

During the last years international cooperation on environmental issues has increased, especially after UNCED in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The efforts made by the United Nations or groups of states to solve more or less global problems through negotiation has brought up a number of questions of interest for the research community. How are inter- national agreements achieved? Which roles do governments, ministries, diplomats, researchers, experts and NGO's play? Is the negotiation- process of today effective or would we get better results through regional, national or local actions? How should we understand the interplay between the different societal levels where environmental 'governance' is created? And what constitutes a successful implementation of a conven- tion or bilateral agreement in practical policy? The Swedish Council for Planning and Coordination of Research (FRN) has since the early 1980's initiatated and funded environmental research, and in particular for research problems with a focus on the interplay between humans~society-natural resources. In order to get a picture of on-going research with relevance to an understanding of inter- national environmental governance, and to stimulate the research com- munity towards addressing new issues, the FRN arranged an inter- national workshop for August 17-19, 1994 at Krusenberg Manor, near Uppsala. The workshop could also be seen in the context of FRN's long term interest in the issues of 'the Human Dimensions of Global Environ- mental Change', including the activities of the Human Dimensions Programme (now IHDP) at the international level.

Scale is a concept the antiquity of which can hardly be traced. Certainly the familiar phenomena that accompany sc ale changes in optical patterns are mentioned in the earliest written records. The most obvious topological changes such as the creation or annihilation of details have been a topic to philosophers, artists and later scientists. This appears to of fascination be the case for all cultures from which extensive written records exist. For th instance, chinese 17 c artist manuals remark that "e;distant faces have no eyes"e; . The merging of details is also obvious to many authors, e. g. , Lucretius mentions the fact that distant islands look like a single one. The one topo- logical event that is (to the best of my knowledge) mentioned only late (by th John Ruskin in his "e;Elements of drawing"e; of the mid 19 c) is the splitting of a blob on blurring. The change of images on a gradual increase of resolu- tion has been a recurring theme in the arts (e. g. , the poetic description of the distant armada in Calderon's The Constant Prince) and this "e;mystery"e; (as Ruskin calls it) is constantly exploited by painters.

G.HAINNAUX Departement Milieu et Activites Agricoles, Centre ORSTOM, 911 Avenue d' Agropolis, B.P. 5045, 34032 Montpellier Cedex , France. Solid state fermentation, popularly abbreviated as SSF, is currently investigated by many groups throughout the world. The study of this technique was largely neglected in the past in European and Western countries and there is now a high demand for SSF, meaning in food, environment, agricultural, phannaceutical and many other biotechnological applications. It gives me satisfaction to note that the importance of this technique was realised at my department way back in 1975 since then, our team has put concentrated efforts on developing this technique. xvii Foreword Advances in Solid State Fermentation Foreword M. PUYGRENIER Agropolis Valorisation, Avenue d' Agropolis, 34394 Montpellier Cedex 5, France. On the name of the Scientific Community, I would like to express the wish that this International Symposium on SSF should be successful. Solid State Fermentation is part of biotechnology research. It consists on seeding solid culture medium with bacteria or fungi (filamentous or higher) and on producing, in this medium (solid components and exudates) metabolites and high value products. In fact, this process is very old. In older industries such the food and agricultural, this technique has been extensively used. An example of this is the production of pork sausages and Roquefort cheese. Pharmaceutical industry could make extensive use of SSF in the production of secondary metabolites of many kinds and development in this direction is soon expected.