The Editorial Board of the journal “Algebra and Discrete mathematics”
is grateful to Lyudmila Turowska and Volodymyr Mazorchuk for their
help, which is difficult to overestimate.

This issue consists of the papers presented at the workshop ``$C^*$--algebras, Lie algebras and related topics'', which was held in the Institute of Mathematics of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences during December 4-6, 2003. The workshop was organized by Yuriy Drozd (Kyiv), Volodymyr Mazorchuk (Uppsala), Vasyl Ostrovskyi (Kyiv), Sergiy Ovsienko (Kyiv), Yuri Samoilenko (Kyiv) and Lyudmila Turowska (Gothenburg) in the framework of the cooperation project between the Department of Functional Analysis, Institute of Mathematics of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Kyiv, Ukraine; Department of Algebra and Mathematical Logics, Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics, Kyiv Taras Shevchenko University, Kyiv, Ukraine; Department of Mathematics, Gothenburg University and Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden; and Department of Mathematics, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden. The project is supported by the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (STINT). The present workshop is the first one in the series of four, planned by the project for the period 2003-2007. The next workshop in the series is planned to be held in Uppsala during the fall of 2004, followed by two more workshops in Kyiv and Gothenburg.

About 30 mathematicians from Hungary, Sweden and Ukraine participated at the workshop, which consisted of 21 talks, held in the friendly and stimulating atmosphere of the Institute of Mathematics. The partner research groups also had enough time for discussions, which paved the way to the successful start of their collaboration.

All the talks on the workshop were concentrated around the structure and representation theory of various classes of algebras. The second working day, December 5th, 2003, was a special day, dedicated to the 60'th Birthday of Professor Yuri Samoilenko. All the talks on this day were presented by the former and present students of Yuri Samoilenko, and have shown the recent developments in the branches of modern functional analysis and representation theory, initiated and originally studied by him.