The IUTAM Symposium on Advances in Nonlinear Shastic Mechanics, held in Trondheim July 3-7, 1995, was the eighth of a series of IUTAM sponsored symposia which focus on the application of shastic methods in mechanics. The previous meetings took place in Coventry, UK (1972), Sout'hampton, UK (1976), FrankfurtjOder, Germany (1982), Skholm, Sweden (1984), Innsbruckjlgls, Austria (1987), Turin, Italy (1991) and San Antonio, Texas (1993). The symposium provided an extraordinary opportunity for scholars to meet and discuss recent advances in shastic mechanics. The participants represented a wide range of expertise, from pure theoreticians to people primarily oriented toward applications. A significant achievement of the symposium was the very extensive discussions taking place over the whole range from highly theoretical questions to practical engineering applications. Several presentations also clearly demonstrated the substantial progress that has been achieved in recent years in terms of developing and implement­ ing shastic analysis techniques for mechanical engineering systems. This aspect was further underpinned by specially invited extended lectures on computational shastic mechanics, engineering applications of shastic mechanics, and nonlinear active control. The symposium also reflected the very active and high-quality research taking place in the field of shastic stability. Ten presentations were given on this topic ofa total of47 papers. A main conclusion that can be drawn from the proceedings of this symposium is that shastic mechanics as a subject has reached great depth and width in both methodology and applicability.