Presents papers from the October 1996 symposium on mathematical foundations of computing, many representing reports of continuing research. Topics include approximate strip packing, polynomial simulation of decohered quantum computers, single-source unsplittable flow, load balancing and density dependent jump Markov processes, a polynomial-time algorithm for learning noisy linear threshold functions, new lower bounds for halfspace emptiness, binary space partitions for fat rectangles, and near-optimal parallel prefetching and caching. No index. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.