Proceedings of the 8th Nordic Combinatorial Conference

The Nordic Combinatorial Conferences were initiated in 1981 by mathematicians from Stavanger. Held approximately every three years since then, the conferences have been able to sustain the interest from combinatorialists all over the Nordic countries. In 2004 the 8th conference is held in Aalborg, Denmark. We are pleased that so many people have chosen to attend, and that lectures were offered from more participants than we had originally reserved time for. We asked two mathematicians to give special lectures and are happy that both accepted immediately. Andries Brouwer from the Technical University of Eindhoven presents a talk on distance-regular graphs, and Ivan Damgaard from Århus University and the data security firm Cryptomatic speaks on secret sharing and secure distributed computing. This volume contains the conference schedule and all abstracts. Speakers were give the opportunity to provide extended summaries as well, and six of the did this. The extended summaries are included in this volume after the abstracts.