This volume is an outgrowth of the AMS Special Session on Extremal Riemann Surfaces held at the Joint Mathematics Meeting in San Francisco, January 1995. The book deals with a variety of extremal problems related to Riemann surfaces. Some papers deal with the identification of surfaces with longest systole (element of shortest nonzero length) for the length spectrum and the Jacobian. Parallels are drawn to classical questions involving extremal lattices.

Other papers deal with maximizing or minimizing functions defined by the spectrum such as the heat kernel, the zeta function, and the determinant of the Laplacian, some from the point of view of identifying an extremal metric.

There are discussions of Hurwitz surfaces and surfaces with large cyclic groups of automorphisms. Also discussed are surfaces which are natural candidates for solving extremal problems such as triangular, modular, and arithmetic surfaces, and curves in various group theoretically defined curve families. Other allied topics are theta identities, quadratic periods of Abelian differentials, Teichmuller disks, binary quadratic forms, and spectral asymptotics of degenerating hyperbolic three manifolds.