Book excerpt: This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed conference proceedings of the 38th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science, MFCS 2013, held in Klosterneuburg, Austria, in August 2013. The 67 revised full papers presented together with six invited talks were carefully selected from 191 submissions. Topics covered include algorithmic game theory, algorithmic learning theory, algorithms and data structures, automata, formal languages, bioinformatics, complexity, computational geometry, computer-assisted reasoning, concurrency theory, databases and knowledge-based systems, foundations of computing, logic in computer science, models of computation, semantics and verification of programs, and theoretical issues in artificial intelligence.