Veliko Tarnovo is situated in the middle of the country, at a distance of about 250 km from the capital Sofia. It is one of the most beautiful Bulgarian towns. Veliko Tarnovo is a town with remarkable history too. It is the former capital of the country offering the tourist the old castle and plenty of other interesting historical sights to visit.

The Applied Mathematics and Informatics Laboratory was  founded in V. Tarnovo in 1988 and was initially meant to deal with application programming for the needs of the research at the Institute of Mathematics (Sofia). The most important software product developed in the first several years was GFQ – a system for computations in and over finite fields. It has been used both for research and educational purposes at many Bulgarian and several foreign universities.

Several years after its foundation the Applied Mathematics and Informatics Laboratory became part of the Mathematics Foundations of Informatics section of the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics. Thus half of the people at the section are presently working in Sofia, and the other half – in V.Tarnovo.

The people at the section are dealing with Combinatorics, Coding Theory, Design Theory, and Cryptography.

The section is coorganizer of an international  workshop on Algebraic and Combinatorial Coding Theory which has been held each two years since 1988 – in Bulgaria, and in Russia. The workshop is usually visited by scientists from a great number of European countries.

The section is organizer of an international  workshop on Optimal Codes which has been held in Bulgaria each three years since 1995.

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