Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 28th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science, MFCS 2003, held in Bratislava, Slovakia in August 2003. The 55 revised full papers presented together with 7 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 137 submissions. All current aspects in theoretical computer science are addressed, ranging from discrete mathematics, combinatorial optimization, graph theory, networking, algorithms, and complexity to programming theory, formal methods, and mathematical logic.