This present volume is the Proceedings of the 18th International C- ference on Nearrings and Near?elds held in Hamburg at the Universit at derBundeswehrHamburgfromJuly27toAugust03,2003. ThisConf- ence was organized by Momme Johs Thomsen and Gerhard Saad from the Universit at der Bundeswehr Hamburg and by Alexander Kreuzer, Hubert Kiechle and Wen-Ling Huang from the Universit a t Hamburg. It was already the second Conference on Nearrings and Near?elds in Hamburg after the Conference on Nearrings and Near?elds at the same venue from July 30 to August 06, 1995. TheConferencewasattendedby57mathematiciansandmanyacc- panying persons who represented 16 countries from all ?ve continents. The ?rst of these conferences took place 35 years earlier in 1968 at the Mathematische Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach in the Black Forest inGermany. Thiswasalsothesiteofthesecond,third,?fthandeleventh conference in 1972, 1976, 1980 and 1989. The other twelve conferences held before the second Hamburg Conference took place in nine di?erent countries. For details about this and, moreover, for a general histo- cal overview of the development of the subject we refer to the article On the beginnings and developments of near-ring theory by Gerhard Betsch [3] in the proceedings of the 13th Conference in Fredericton, New Brunswick,Canada. Duringthelast?ftyyearsthetheoryofnearringsandrelatedalgebraic structures like near?elds, nearmodules, nearalgebras and seminearrings has developed into an extensive branch of algebra with its own features.

Invited Addresses.- On Recent Developments of Planar Nearrings.- Some Problems Related to Near-Rings of Mapping.- Some Recent Developments in Group Near-Rings.- Loop-Nearrings.- The Z-Constrained Conjecture.- Contributed Papers.- Primeness and Radicals in Near-Rings of Continuous Functions.- Difference Methods and Ferrero Pairs.- Zero-Divisor Graphs of Nearrings and Semigroups.- Additive Gs-Automata and Syntactic Nearrings.- On the Nilpotence of the S-Radical in Matrix Near-Rings.- A Right Radical for Right D.G. Near-Rings.- From Involution Sets, Graphs and Loops to Loop-Nearrings.- Semi-Nearrings of Bivariate Polynomials over a Field.- Automorphism Groups Emitting Local Endomorphism Nearrings II.- Planar Near-Rings, Sandwich Near-Rings and Near-Rings with Right Identity.- On the f-Prime Radical of Near-Rings.- On Finite Goldie Dimension of Mn(N)-Group Nn.- Near-Rings, Cohomology and Extensions.