Talk:Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science

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SFCS

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]