Building on the tradition of an outstanding series of conferences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the organizers attracted an international group of scholars to open the new Millennium with a conference that reviewed the current state of number theory research and pointed to future directions in the field.

The conference was the largest general number theory conference in recent history, featuring a total of 159 talks, with the plenary lectures given by George Andrews, Jean Bourgain, Kevin Ford, Ron Graham, Andrew Granville, Roger Heath-Brown, Christopher Hooley, Winnie Li, Kumar Murty, Mel Nathanson, Ken Ono, Carl Pomerance, Bjorn Poonen, Wolfgang Schmidt, Chris Skinner, K. Soundararajan, Robert Tijdeman, Robert Vaughan, and Hugh Williams.

The Proceedings Volumes of the conference review some of the major number theory achievements of this century and to chart some of the directions in which the subject will be heading during the new century. These volumes will serve as a useful reference to researchers in the area and an introduction to topics of current interest in number theory for a general audience in mathematics.