FOCS

Next week is the 44th FOCS Conference in Boston. FOCS, the Symposium on the Foundations of Computer Science is, with STOC, one of the two major American general theory conferences. Okay, usually American. STOC was in Crete in 2001 and FOCS will be in Rome next year but the other 77 FOCS and STOC conferences were held in North America.

I won't be attending the FOCS conference this year, but will definitely be at the next STOC being held in Chicago. I'll likely ask a grad student to pick me up a FOCS proceedings. I'm not sure why; most of the papers are available on-line, the proceedings take up valuable bookshelf space and I've barely opened the proceedings of the last few conferences. But I have a complete set of STOC, FOCS and Complexity proceedings going back to 1986 and I'm a sucker for tradition.