In recent years there has been an extensive increase in research on both the design and analysis of algorithms for various combinatorial structures. Contributions have come from people in several fields such as mathematics, computing science, electrical engineering, and others. Since there is often a problem with dialogue between people working in different fields (manifesting itself in too much duplication) and since we were not aware of any previous conference that had devoted itself to looking at algorithms for combinatorial structures, we decided in the Fall of 1975 to organize a conference that would bring together leading experts in several areas to focus their attention on algorithms for combinatorial structures.