Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 33rd International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science, MFCS 2008, held in Torun, Poland, in August 2008. The 45 revised full papers presented together with 5 invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 119 submissions. All current aspects in theoretical computer science and its mathematical foundations are addressed, ranging from algorithmic game theory, algorithms and data structures, artificial intelligence, automata and formal languages, bioinformatics, complexity, concurrency and petrinets, cryptography and security, logic and formal specifications, models of computations, parallel and distributed computing, semantics and verification.