In the first week of February, 1986, the Centre of Mathematical Analysis hosted a workshop on inverse problems as part of the 26th Summer Research Institute run by the Australian Mathematical Society. The workshop was organized to bring together a group of people with experience in the area of inverse problems to consider a number of practical inverse problems encountered by other researchers in various fields. The hope was that presentations and discussions of these problems both would help progress towards their solution in particular, and would encourage interest and collaboration among participants in general.

Three particular practical problems were presented in detail; the determination of flaws to castings by inverse scattering, the determination of coefficients of governing flow in aquifers, and the determination of geological structures from aeromagnetic surveys. Since all are difficult problems and are the subjects of concerted research efforts both in Australia and elsewhere, the presentations have been gathered together in these proceedings to provide a clear statement of the problems and of research being carried out on them.