The Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics
began with two NSF-funded workshops, both held at Kansas State University, and organized by Austin Melton and Dave Schmidt. At the 1986 workshop, Austin, Dave, Michael Main (Colorado) and Mike Mislove (Tulane) decided to organize a European-style conference, and to hold it on the campus of Tulane University, New Orleans, the following spring. That 1987 meeting was the first MFPS conference, and the series has met every year since then. In its early years. Tulane was a regular host, but meetings also took place at Queens University, Canada (1990) and Carnegie Mellon (1991), while the 1992 Conference at the University of Oxford marked its first meeting abroad.
For the first several years, MFPS alternated between a Conference format, with a Call for Papers, etc., and a Workshop format in which all participants could give contributed talks. The workshop format was motivated by the desire to include mathematicians, who had to give a talk in order to secure travel funding to attend meetings.
Eventually the dual mode was abandoned in favor of an annual Conference. In conference years, the Proceedings were published in Springer’s LNCS series, but this changed in 1995, when MFPS began publishing its proceedings in the online series Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science. In the workshop years, special issues of Theoretical Computer Science served as a venue for journal versions of some of the results presented at the meeting.
Throughout its history, MFPS has been a peripatetic conference with meetings at institutions located in the US and Canada, eventually expanding to the UK and Europe. In recent years, MFPS has met most often in Europe and the UK, with only occasional meetings in the US.
Over the years, MFPS also has broadened its scope, in an attempt to link to related areas of research. An early meeting had a special session on model checking, and later topics included security, which has been represented since the late 1990s, and later additions were systems biology and more recently, quantum computation.
In the past several years, MFPS has established relationships with related conferences, having co-located with CALCO in the odd years since 2015, and with QPL (Quantum Physics and Logic) in 2018 and 2020. In fact, MFPS and CALCO have just completed an agreement to co-locate their meetings in odd years, going forward.