Preface

AbstractForeword This volume contains the Proceedings of the Thirteenth Conference on the Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics. The Conference was held on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA from March 23 to March 26, 1997. The meeting was co-chaired by Stephen Brookes and Michael Mislove, who also co-chaired the Program Committee.The papers in this volume were selected by the Program Committee from submissions received in response to a Call for Papers, or were solicited by the Organizers and Program Committee. As has been customary with past MFPS Conferences, there was a preliminary Proceedings that was distributed in hardcopy at the meeting. Authors have had a chance to revise their papers after the conference, and this electronic version of the Proceedings contains revised versions the original submissions.Thanks are due to a number of people who have provided support for the conference. Among this group are the Program Committee members, who are, Paul Gastin(LITP)Radha Jagadeesan(Loyola, Chicago)Michael Huth(Kansas State)Neil Jones(DIKU)Alan Jeffrey(Sussex)Peter O'Hearn(Queen Mary / Westfield)Prakash Panangaden(McGill)John Power(Edinburgh)Edmund Robinson(Sussex)Giuseppe Rosolini(Genova)Jan Rutten(CWI)Dieter Spreen(Siegen)Ian Stark(Aarhus)Also, thanks are due to the anonymous referees who helped review the submissions for the meeting.There was one special session during the meeting. This focused on the contributions that Dana Scott has made to the area of semantics research. As the Dedication below indicates, the occasion for this special session was Dana's 65th birthday year. We thank the participants for their contributions.The Organizers for the MFPS series are Stephen Brookes, Michael Main, Austin Melton, Michael Mislove and David Schmidt. On behalf of the participants, we wish to express our thanks both to the Office of Naval Research, and especially Dr. Ralph Wachter, who have generously supported this series.Lastly, we also wish to thank Ms. Jan Koehler, who provided very efficiently attended to the details of arranging for the meeting needs. Without her efforts, the meeting would not have run as smoothly nor have been as productive and enjoyable as it was for the participants