This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 27th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science, MFCS 2002, held in Warsaw, Poland in August 2002.The 48 revised full papers presented together with 5 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 108 submissions. All relevant aspects of theoretical computer science are addressed, ranging from discrete mathematics, combinatorial optimization, graph theory, algorithms, and complexity to programming theory, formal methods, and mathematical logic.

String matching is one of the oldest algorithmic techniques, yet still one of the most pervasive in computer science. The past 20 years have seen technological leaps in applications as diverse as information retrieval and compression. This copiously illustrated collection of puzzles and exercises in key areas of text algorithms and combinatorics on words offers graduate students and researchers a pleasant and direct way to learn and practice with advanced concepts. The problems are drawn from a large range of scientific publications, both classic and new. Building up from the basics, the book goes on to showcase problems in combinatorics on words (including Fibonacci or Thue-Morse words), pattern matching (including Knuth-Morris-Pratt and Boyer-Moore like algorithms), efficient text data structures (including suffix trees and suffix arrays), regularities in words (including periods and runs) and text compression (including Huffman, Lempel-Ziv and Burrows-Wheeler based methods).

This is an introduction to the field of efficient parallel algorithms and to the techniques for efficient parallelisation. It is self-contained and presumes no special knowledge of parallel computers or particular mathematics. The book emphasises designing algorithms within the timeless and abstracted context of a high-level programming language rather than within highly specific computer architectures. This is an approach which concentrates on the essence of algorithmic theory, determining and taking advantage of the inherently parallel nature of certain types of problem. The authors present regularly-used techniques and a range of algorithms which includes some of the more celebrated and well-known. Efficient Parallel Algorithms is targeted at non-specialists who are considering entering the field of parallel algorithms. It will be particularly useful for courses aimed at advanced undergraduate or new postgraduate students of computer science and mathematics.

The matching problem is one of the central problems in graph theory as well as in the theory of algorithms and their applications. This book will provide the reader with a comprehensive and straightforward introduction to the basic methods of designing efficient parallel algorithms for graph matching problems. The text is written for students at the beginning graduate level. The exposition is mostly self-contained and example-driven. Prerequisites have been kept to a minimum by including relevant background material. The book contains full details of several new techniques and should also be of interest to research workers in computer science, operations research, discrete mathematics, and electrical engineering. The main theoretical tools are combined into three independent chapters, devoted to combinatorial tools, probabilistic tools, and algebraic tools. One of the main goals of the book is to bring together these three approaches and highlight how their combination works in the development of efficient parallel algorithms. The reader will be provided with a simple and transparent presentation of a variety of interesting algorithms, including many examples and illustrations. The combination of different approaches makes the matching problem and its applications an attractive and fascinating subject. It is hoped that the book represents a meeting point of interesting algorithmic techniques and opens up new algebraic and geometric areas. Marek Karpinski is Chair Professor of Computer Science at the University of Bonn. Wojciech Rytter is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Warsaw and at the University of Liverpool.