This volume presents the proceedings of the Second Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA '94), held near Utrecht, The Netherlands in September 1994. ESA is the premier European conference on algorithms. The 42 papers presented were selected from a total of 159 submissions and reflect many of the current directions in algorithm research. The volume is organized into chapters on automatic graph drawing and rendering, spanners and Steiner trees, efficient data structures and complexity analysis, graph algorithms, distributed algorithms, computational geometry and its applications, operations research and combinatorial optimization, parallel computation and interconnection networks, complexity theory, and text processing