Special Section on the Fortieth Annual ACM Symposium On Theory Of Computing (STOC 2008)

In keeping with an annual tradition, this issue of the SIAM Journal on Computing contains extended versions of selected papers from the Fortieth Annual ACM Conference on Theory of Computing (STOC 2008), held in Victoria, British Columbia, May 17-20, 2008. The committee, comprising James Aspnes, Shai Ben-David, Shuchi Chawla, Bernard Chazelle, Steve Chien, Xiaotie Deng, Cynthia Dwork (chair), Martin Dyer, Ronald Fagin, Joan Feigenbaum, Anupam Gupta, Venkatesan Guruswami, Konstantin Makarychev, Elchanan Mossel, Rafael Pass, Oded Regev, Omer Reingold, Ronitt Rubinfeld, David Shmoys, Luca Trevisan, and Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, selected 80 papers from 320 submissions under consideration. Nine of these papers appear in this special section, each one expanded and then refereed according to the journal's exacting standards. The papers cover a diverse set of topics: We thank the authors, the referees, and the full program committee for all the work that lead to this volume.