This book grew out of a series of talks and closely related papers on tight and taut submanifolds given at the Workshop on Differential Systems, Submanifolds, and Control Theory held at MSRI on March 1-4, 1994. The workshop was organized by Robert Bryant and Shiing-shen Chern.

The book is dedicated to the memory of Professor Nicolaas H. Kuiper, who died on December 12, 1994. Kuiper made major contributions to the field of tight and taut submanifolds over an extended period of time. In particular, his technique of the analysis of topsets became an essential tool in almost all work in the area of tight immersions and maps. The book begins with a short description of Kuiper's life and work, written by Thomas Banchoff. Six of the seven subsequent articles cover various parts of the broad field of tight and taut submanifolds. The book concludes with an extensive bibliography of the field compiled by Wolfgang Kühnel and Thomas Cecil, a list of Kuiper's publications, and one of his doctoral students.

The first paper in the collection is an unfinished manuscript written by Kuiper himself. The paper was intended to be a survey of the field, and it is based on the Roever Lectures in Geometry that Kuiper gave at Washington University in St. Louis during the period January 20-24, 1986. In its current state the article is a masterly introduction to the subject and a good exposition of some more advanced topics, concentrating on topological aspects, in particular the analysis of topsets.