ISSAC is the yearly premier international symposium in Symbolic and Algebraic Computation. It provides an opportunity to learn of new developments and to present original research results in all areas of symbolic mathematical computation. Planned activities include invited presentations, research and survey papers, poster sessions, tutorial courses, vendor exhibits and software demonstrations.

ISSAC is a three day conference to be held in the later half of July. Its subject matter covers symbolic computation in a broad sense, and the conference officers may chose an emphasis subject for a given meeting. ISSAC solicits, reviews, and publishes papers describing original research. The papers are submitted about one half year before the Conference and reviewed by the Program Committee. The Program Committee accepts electronic submissions by electronic mail and submissions by regular mail. The program committee sends submitted papers to at least two specialists for expert evaluation. Authors of rejected papers are given these reports by the experts. Accepted papers are published in Proceedings that are available at the Conference.

Persons serving as Program Committee Chairs cannot submit papers on which they are authors or co-authors. The program committee has between 12 and 20 members.

The program may include no more than three invited plenary speakers, who may publish their presentations as papers in the Proceedings. The core program may be framed in adjacent days by tutorials, workshops, user meetings, and other events.

Algorithmic mathematics: Algebraic, symbolic, and symbolic-numeric algorithms in all areas of mathematics;

Computer science: Theoretical and practical questions in symbolic mathematical computation, including computer algebra systems and problem solving environments, programming languages and libraries for symbolic computation, user interfaces, data structures, parallel computing, software architectures, concrete analysis and benchmarking, artificial intelligence techniques, automatic differentiation, and code generation;

Applications: Problem treatments incorporating algebraic, symbolic or symbolic-numeric computation in an essential or novel way, including engineering, economics and finance, physical and biological sciences, computer science, logic, mathematics, statistics, and use in education.

The ISSAC conference series dates back to 1966, with ISSAC 96 being the 21st meeting.
The name ``ISSAC'' was first used for the 1988 meeting, when the European EUROSAM/ EUROCAL/ EUROCAM conferences were merged with the North American SYMSAM/ SYMSAC stream.
While some of the meetings in this series have only sought national-level sponsorship, the majority have been sponsored by ACM Sigsam.