This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th Annual International European Symposium on Algorithms, ESA'97, held in Graz, Austria, September 1997. The 38 revised full papers presented were selected from 112 submitted papers. The papers address a broad spectrum of theoretical and applicational aspects in algorithms theory and design. Among the topics covered are approximation algorithms, graph and network algorithms, combinatorial optimization, computational biology, computational mathematics, data compression, distributed computing, evolutionary algorithms, neural computing, online algorithms, parallel computing, pattern matching, and others.