Algorithms are a central concept in computer science. The German Science Foundation (DFG) started a special joint initiative on data structures and efficient algorithms in 1986 with the aim of encouraging collaborative research on algorithms. For a period of five years about a dozen projects were funded with an emphasis on algorithms and data structures for geometric problems, on the one hand, and parallel and distributed algorithms, on the other. This volume contains 18 papers that are intended to give an impression of the achievements of this joint research initiative. The first group of papers addresses research on fundamental data structures, computational geometry, graph algorithms, computer graphics, and spatial databases. The second group of papers centers on the following problems: the design of parallel architectures and routing strategies, simulation of parallel machines, and the design of distributed algorithms for solving difficult problems.