However, a decent part of our time, effort, and money is spent inefficientlybecause the knowledge added is hard to retrieve and, in fact, very little time,effort, and money is currently spent for improving the management ofmathematical knowledge.

Of course, the advancements of computer technology, in particular the globalweb, promise to give us new tools of unprecedented power for making knowledgeretrieval much more efficient and, of course, we already feel the practical andpleasant implications of this in our daily work when, by doing a few clicks, weget access to a huge amount of relevant information whose retrieval would havetaken us many hours in libraries etc. just a couple of years ago.

However, I think that the urgently necessary improvement of mathematicalknowledge management is essentially not a technological question but rather adeeply mathematical question and, in fact, a question of improving ourabilities to do formal mathematics. I believe that mathematical knowledgemanagement will turn out to be one of the most exciting future topics ofmathematics and will lead to a new understanding of the fundamentals ofmathematics in the same way as the foundational problems of mathematics in theearly 20th century lead to a new, and much deeper, understanding of mathematicsand to a whole wave of new directions, techniques and results. The impacts ofadvances in mathematical knowledge management on all of science and technologywill be dramatic both because of the role of mathematics as the universal"thinking technology" of all science and technology and because techniques tobe worked out for mathematical knowledge management will be applicable also forother, less structured, disciplines.

I also think that significant improvement in mathematical knowledge managementwill only be possible if the next generation of mathematicians reaches a muchhigher level in mastering the formal aspects of our field. Thus mathematicalknowledge management is neither only a question of computer technology nor onlya mathematical question but also a question of the sociology of themathematical community. I am deeply convinced that ample time must be reservedfor a thorough practical training of students in the formal and methodologicalaspects of mathematics in future math and computer science curricula. Only bycombining the best tools of computer technology with a new and deepunderstanding and mastering of the structural formal fabrics of mathematics andthe improved formal training of mathematicians will it be possible to reach anew level of accessibility and, hence, usefulness of mathematics.

Because of the high topicality of the emerging field of mathematical knowledgemanagement, I decided to guest-edit a special issue on this topic for theAnnals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence and, in preparation of thisspecial issue but organizationally independently, to organize an internationalworkshop at RISC. I think that, as far as I know, this workshop is the firstinternational event explicitly devoted to the topic of mathematical knowledgemanagement in general and I am very happy that so many researchers representingso many different approaches are following our invitation. I am looking forwardto presentations and discussions that will produce new interactions, ideas,projects and joint political activities for fast advancements in the next fewyears. In fact, some participants already proposed to host the future secondand further editions of the MKM workshop. I think this is great and shows howtimely and topical the workshop is.

Let me also take the opportunity to thank those who contributed to making theworkshop possible, most prominently to Olga Caprotti, Christian Vogt, andBetina Curtis who basically structured, supervised and did all the preparatorywork for this workshop so that I just could enjoy the excitement of themathematical aspect of the field.

Bruno Buchberger