STOC

The papers in this volume were presented at the Thirty-Fourth Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC2002), held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, May 19-21, 2002. The Symposium was sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT).In response to a call for papers, 287 paper submissions were received. All were submitted electronically. The program committee conducted its deliberations electronically, via an on-line meeting that ran from January 10 to January 19. The committee selected 91 papers from among the submissions. The submissions were not refereed, and many of these papers represented reports of continuing research. It is expected that most of them will appear in a more polished and complete form in scientific journals.The papers encompassed in wide variety of areas of theoretical computer science. The topics included algorithms and computational complexity bounds for classical problems in algebra, geometry, topology, graph theory, game theory, logic and machine learning, as well as theoretical aspects of security, databases, information retrieval, and networks, the web, computational biology, and alternative models of computation including quantum computation and self-assembly.