The theory of minimal surfaces has expanded in many directions over the past decade or two. This volume gathers in one place an overview of some of the most exciting developments, presented by five of the leading contributors to those developments. H.Fujimoto, who obtained the definitive results on the Gauss map of minimal surfaces, reports on Minimal Surfaces and Nevanlinna Theory. S.Hildebrandt provides an up-to-date account of the Plateau problem and related boundary-value problems. D.Hoffman and H.Karcher describe the wealth of results on embedded minimal surfaces from the past decade, starting with Costa's surface and the subsequent Hoffman-Meeks examples. Finally, L.Simon covers the PDE aspect of minimal surfaces, with a survey of known results both in the classical case of surfaces and the higher dimensional case.