The International Graph Theory Conference held at Łagów Zamek (Castle), Poland. February 10 - 13, 1981 was dedicated, as are these proceedings, to the memory of Professor Kazimierz Kuratowski. In fact, graph theory represents only a small part of the work of Kazimierz Kuratowski consisting as it does of some 180 scientific publications. However, a single paper by him and characterising planar graphs has made no small contribution to graph theory. Indeed, this paper,
Sur le probleme de courbes gauches en Topologie, Fundamenta Mathematicae, 15 (1930), 274-283,
is the most frequently cited paper in the graph theory literature [G. Bergman, Frequently cited publications in pure graph theory, Journal of Graph Theory, 1 (1977), 175-180], Kazimierz Kuratowski's paper, published in French, appears here for the first time in English translation due to Professor Jan Jaworowski (Indiana University, Bloomington, USA), and with the kind permission of the Kuratowski Family and the Editors of Fundamenta Mathematicae.
The collection of graph theory papers here is by no means a "festschrift" for Kazimierz Kuratowski, but rather an expression of thanks from graph theorists for a singular contribution to our subject made by a great Polish Mathematician. For this reason we have included neither a photograph nor a discussion of his life and work. Both can be found in Journal of Graph Theory, Volume 4.