AbstractSoftware development capabilities lag far behind society's demands for better, cheaper, more reliable software. Software engineering being originally very much restricted to the idea of programming develops more and more into a universal discipline of systems engineering. We give a general introduction to a software engineering workshop dealing with mathematics and formal methods that help solve practical problems in the engineering of computer based systems and engineering automation. Some of its papers detail the circumstances under which such gains can be realized using currently known techniques, thus providing a snapshot of the current state of the art in the area