Preface: Volume 7

The Brazilian Symposium on Graphs, Algorithms and Combinatorics will be held in Fortaleza, Cearل, Brazil, March 17-19, 2001, in combination with the Brazilian Summer School on Combinatorics and Algorithms, to be held at this same place, March 12-16 and 20-24. atorics has been a very active area, throughout the world, with a strong emphasys in graph theory. The connections with algorithms are clear. The applications to computer science have substantially increased its importance. The Symposium is bringing together specialists in graph theory and algorithms from many different parts of the world. Although the Symposium has been announced as a Brazilian Symposium, there have been submissions from authors coming from 21 different countries. roceedings contains extended abstracts of the first selection of the papers submitted to the Symposium. They will form a volume of the Electronic Notes in Discrete Mathematics. In addition, there will be a special volume of Discrete Applied Mathematics, dedicated to the Symposium. The full papers to be included in this special volume are going to be selected among those presented at the Symposium, after a normal refereeing process. ld like to thank our special invited speakers for agreeing to participate at the Symposium: A. Bondy, V. Chvلtal, G. Cornuéjols, L. Devroye, L. Lovلsz, B. Reed and W. Tutte. In particular, the efforts and ideas of Bruce Reed were essential for this Symposium to exist, at all. Once more, Brazilian Combinatorics is indebted to him.