This special issue contains selected papers that were presented at the 8th International Conference on Numerical Optimization and Numerical Linear Algebra, which was held in Xiamen, Fujian Province, China, November 7–11, 2011. That conference was the 8th of the biennial conference series, with previous ones being held in Qingdao (1997), Nanjing (1999), Dunhuang (2001), Guilin (2003), Lhasa (2005), Urumuqi (2007) and Lijiang (2009). All the nine papers in this special issue have been through rigorous refereeing procedures, as set by Optimization Methods and Software (OMS). These papers provide a condensed overview of the very successful conference of ICNONLA 2011. We would like to thank OMS editorial board members Ekkehard Sachs and Takashi Tsuchiya for their helps in handling some papers of this special issue.
We would like to thank all the invited speakers: O. Burdakov, R. Chan, X.J. Chen, M. Fukushima, C. T. Kelley, T. Koch, G. Di Pillo, M.J.D. Powell, L.N. Trefethen, Y.M. Wei, N.H. Xiu, H.C. Zhang, and S.L. Zhang, together with all the participants for making a high level conference. The conference was supported by the State Key Laboratory of Scientific and Engineering Computing, Institute of Computational Mathematics and Scientific/Engineering Computing, Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Chinese Mathematical Society.