The São Carlos Workshop on Real and Complex Singularities is the longest running workshop in singularities. It is held every two years and is a key international event for people working in the field. This volume contains papers presented at the eighth workshop, held at the IML, Marseille, July 19–23, 2004. The workshop offers the opportunity to establish the state of the art and to present new trends, new ideas and new results in all of the branches of singularities. This is reflected by the contributions in this book. The main topics discussed are equisingularity of sets and mappings, geometry of singular complex analytic sets, singularities of mappings, characteristic classes, classification of singularities, interaction of singularity theory with some of the new ideas in algebraic geometry imported from theoretical physics, and applications of singularity theory to geometry of surfaces in low dimensional euclidean spaces, to differential equations and to bifurcation theory.