This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms, ESA'97, held in Venice, Italy, in August 1998.The 40 revised full papers presented together with two invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 131 submissions. The book is divided into sections on data structures, strings and biology, numerical algorithms, geometry, randomized and online algorithms, parallel and distributed algorithms, graph algorithms, and optimization.