The present issue contains some selected and refereed papers presented in the LINSTAT-2012 conference held jointly with the 21st International Workshop on Matrices and Statistics (IWMS) in B¸edlewo, Poland, July 16-20, 2012, at the Mathematical Research and Conference Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences, see the website http://linstat2012.au.poznan.pl/ 
Several papers in this issue were presented on 19 July 2012 at the Special Session to Celebrate George P.H. Styan's 75th Birthday.
LINSTAT-2012 and IWMS-2012 were organized and supported by Stefan Banach International Mathematical Center, Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw), Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of the Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznań), Institute of Socio-Economic Geography and Spatial Management of the Adam Mickiewicz University and the Department of Mathematical and Statistical Methods of the Poznań University of Life Sciences.
The Scientific Committees of LINSTAT-2012 and IWMS-2012 were chaired by Augustyn Markiewicz and Simo Puntanen, respectively, while the head of Organizing Committee was Katarzyna Filipiak. The purpose of the event was to bring together researchers sharing an interest in a variety of aspects of statistics and its applications as well as matrix analysis and its applications to statistics, and offer them a possibility to discuss current developments in these subjects.
The event will bridge the gap among statisticians, computer scientists and mathematicians in understanding each other's tools. The conferences were continuation of earlier international meetings, which provided a good occasion for a review of important research in statistics. The next meeting in the LINSTAT series will be held in Linköping, Sweden, 24-28 August 2014), website: http://www.mai.liu.se/LinStat2014/ , and the IWMS-2014 will be held in Ljubljana, Slovenia, 8-12 June 2014, website: http://www.law05.si/iwms/index.php?stran=general During the five days, 132 participants from 24 countries had the chance of taking part in over 44 sessions. The invited speakers of Special Session to Celebrate George P.H. Styan's 75th Birthday were the following: Oskar Maria Baksalary, Philip V. Bertrand, Ka Lok Chu, Carlos A. Coelho, Knut Conradsen, Stephen J. Haslett, Jan Hauke, Peter Loly (video representation), Simo Puntanen, Alastair J. Scott, and George P.H. Styan.
George P.H. Styan has a remarkable scientific career, most of it being on the border between linear algebra and statistics. Over the years, Polish influence of this research area has been of great importance to him. In August 1980, George met Jerzy K. Baksalary, a famous figure of the Poznań school of linear statistical models, first time, when he was invited by Andrzej Kozek to visit Poland and to give a lecture at the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Wroclaw and Andrzej arranged for him, with help from Jerzy Baksalary and Radoslaw Kala, also to give a lecture at the Agricultural University of Poznań.
Both Baksalary and Kala met him at the main railway station in Poznań on Wednesday, 27 August 1980. On Thursday 28 August, Poznań's public transit went on strike (this was the beginning of the Solidarity movement) and everybody ended up walking to attend George's talk. [For interesting comments on the development of Linear Algebra in Poznań, see the article by Jan Hauke and Augustyn Markiewicz, Image: The Bulletin of the ILAS, Issue 50, Spring 2013, pp. 16-17.] 
As the Guest Editors of this issue, we wish to express our sincere thanks to all contributors, referees, and in particular, to the Editor-in-Chief, Professor Roman Zmyślony, for all support.