This book was written in honour of Noel Baker following his sudden death in 2001. It comprises a collection of articles written by friends, colleagues and former students of Noel. In particular, we are delighted that Noel's MSc supervisor and long-time friend, George Szekeres, was able to contribute a paper to this volume—he sadly died before the book was published.

All of these articles deal with topics that interested Noel and, in most cases, they are in areas where Noel's own work has been very influential. Several of the papers are survey articles that we hope will be a valuable addition to the literature. There are also new results that Noel would have been delighted to have seen. Most of the papers deal with the iteration of transcendental meromorphic functions—the field in which Noel was pre-eminent and in which he carried out much of the pioneering work—and there are also some papers in closely related topics that he would have enjoyed. As this volume shows, much of the recent work in complex dynamics (as the subject of iteration theory is now called) builds on ideas and techniques that Noel introduced and that will continue to be used by all those who work in this field. We hope that this book will be a fitting memorial to a man who inspired so many of us.