this book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 22nd international symposium on mathematical foundations of computer science, mfcs 97, held in bratislava, slovakia, in august 1997.the 40 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from a total of 94 submissions. also included are nine invited papers and two abstracts of invited talks. the papers cover the whole range of theoretical computer science including programming theory, complexity theory, mathematical logic, rewriting, grammars, formal languages, theory of algorithms, computational graph theory, etc.