This volume contains the proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Mathematics of ProgramConstruction, MPC 2006,held at Kuressaare, Estonia, July 3-5, 2006, colocated with the 11th International Conference on Algebraic Methodology and Software Technology, AMAST 2006, July 5-8, 2006. TheMPCconferencesaimtopromotethedevelopmentofmathematicalpr- ciples and techniques that are demonstrably useful and usable in the process of constructing computer programs. Topics of interest range from algorithmics to support for program construction in programming languages and systems. The previous MPCs were held at Twente, The Netherlands (1989, LNCS 375), Oxford, UK (1992, LNCS 669), Kloster Irsee, Germany (1995,LNCS 947), Marstrand, Sweden (1998, LNCS 1422), Ponte de Lima, Portugal (2000, LNCS 1837), Dagstuhl, Germany (2002, LNCS 2386) and Stirling, UK (2004, LNCS 3125, colocated with AMAST 2004). MPC 2006 received 45 submissions. Each submission was reviewed by four Programme Committee members or additional referees. The committee decided to accept 22 papers. In addition, the programme included three invited talks by Robin Cockett (University of Calgary, Canada), Olivier Danvy (Aarhus Univ- sitet, Denmark) and Oege de Moor (University of Oxford, UK). The review process and compilation of the proceedings were greatly helped by Andrei Voronkov's EasyChair system that I can only recommend to every programme chair. MPC 2006 had one satellite workshop, the Workshop on Mathematically Structured Functional Programming, MSFP 2006, organized as a "small" wo- shop of the FP6 IST coordination action TYPES. This took place July 2, 2006.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Mathematics of Program Construction, MPC 2002, held in Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in July 2002. The 11 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book; also presented are one invited paper and the abstracts of two invited talks. Among the topics covered are programming methodology, program specification, program transformation, programming paradigms, programming calculi, and programming language semantics.

Program construction is about turning specifications of computer software into implementations. Recent research aimed at improving the process of program construction exploits insights from abstract algebraic tools such as lattice theory, fixpoint calculus, universal algebra, category theory, and allegory theory. This textbook-like tutorial presents, besides an introduction, eight coherently written chapters by leading authorities on ordered sets and complete lattices, algebras and coalgebras, Galois connections and fixed point calculus, calculating functional programs, algebra of program termination, exercises in coalgebraic specification, algebraic methods for optimization problems, and temporal algebra.