Talk:Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Computer science, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Computer science related articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Computer scienceWikipedia:WikiProject Computer scienceTemplate:WikiProject Computer scienceComputer science articles

???

This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

Things you can help WikiProject Computer science with:

Here are some tasks awaiting attention:

Article requests :
- Requested articles/Applied arts and sciences/Computer science, computing, and Internet
Cleanup :
- Computer science articles needing attention
- Computer science articles needing expert attention
Copyedit :
- Computing
Expand :
- Computer science
Infobox :
- Computer science articles without infoboxes
Maintain :
- Timeline of computing 2020–present
Photo :
- Find pictures for the biographies of computer scientists (see List of computer scientists)
- Computing articles needing images
Stubs :
- Computer science stubs
Unreferenced :
- WikiProject Computer science/Unreferenced BLPs
Project-related :
- Tag all relevant articles in Category:Computer science and sub-categories with {{WikiProject Computer science}}

Academic Journals

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Academic Journals, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Academic Journals on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Academic JournalsWikipedia:WikiProject Academic JournalsTemplate:WikiProject Academic JournalsAcademic Journal articles
	This article has been marked as needing an infobox.
See WikiProject Academic Journals' writing guide for tips on how to improve this article.

SFCS[edit]

During a recent search for literature on the time complexity of matrix multiplication, I found the acronym "SFCS" several times, e.g. in the 1978 Proceedings, where it is even part of the DOI http://doi.org/10.1109/SFCS.1978.34 , and in Virginia Vassilevska Williams' [www.cs.stanford.edu/~virgi/matrixmult-f.pdf 2014 TR] (p.73, ref.[9]). Therefore, I'd like to mention "SFCS" somewhere in the article (could be in the history section), and to link to there from (a hatnote at) SFCS. - Jochen Burghardt (talk) 09:02, 14 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

As far as I know, "SFCS" is the acronym used officially by the publisher (IEEE), but never by the participants, who invariably call it FOCS. This is reflected, for instance, in the names of the non-IEEE websites for the conference such as https://focs2020.cs.duke.edu/ as well as the usage in all the sources for the article. If/when SFCS appears in bibliographies it is because people have been copying metadata from the publisher; that tech report you link that lists two references in a row with one as "Proc. SFCS" and the other as "Proc. FOCS" is merely sloppy, not informative. It would be good to find a source saying something about this rather than doing our own original research and guesswork on abbreviations, though. For instance, your earlier guess based on the sloppy tech report bibliography that SFCS is an older name that was later changed is, I believe, incorrect. The conference name has indeed been changed (long ago, as our article says), but not in a way that affects the SFCS/FOCS distinction. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:43, 14 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Re Special:Diff/984358455: even if you meant to write "the IEEE" instead of "the editor", the diff is incorrect or dubious. The range of dates during which, as of today, the web site lists past conferences under the acronym "SFCS", is not necessarily the range of dates under which those conference web sites with that acronym existed. They could have been created much later, and almost certainly were, as the web did not exist in 1975. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:14, 19 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]