a personal view of the theory of computation
The Question I recently restarted working on this CS theory blog. One reason that I took a bit to get it going again is really stupid. Really silly. And perhaps I should not talk about it. It does not make me look smart. But here it goes anyway. My email system stopped working recently. I […]
Rabin has sadly just passed away at 94. This is a short piece on honoring him immediately. More is planned for the future. His work has touched key areas of mathematics as well as central areas of computer theory. Without his work theory would be completely different today. Michael’s work is an incredible mine with […]
My dear wife, Kathryn Farley, just woke me this Friday the 20th from a nap with something that she said was amazing. She told me it was the top most viewed video of the entire day—over a million views. It was indeed terrific—especially for a video by women who work in complexity theory. A Result […]
This Sunday’s NYTimes had an article on Eliyahu Rips who just just passed away at 75. He was an Israeli mathematician known for his research in geometric group theory. He had became known to the general public years ago following his co-authoring a paper on what is popularly known as Bible code, the supposed coded […]
Santosh Vempala is the chair of this FOCS 2024 conference. Here is the schedule of the talks. And in our next section are the accepted papers with links so you can see the results now. His committee is: Daniel Alabi, Columbia Nima Anari, Stanford Maryam Aliakbarpour, Rice Xiaotie Deng, Peking University Jelena Diakonikolas, Wisconsin Alina […]
Math problems get solved from time to time. Today I wonder if they are solved the way we guessed they were going to be solved? For example do most feel that P vs NP is likely to be equal or unequal? William Gasarch has conducted three polls of researchers concerning this question. Confidence that P […]
The Fulkerson prize is given to: outstanding papers in the area of discrete mathematics and is sponsored jointly by the Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS) and the American Mathematical Society (AMS). Up to three awards of \$1,500 each are presented at each (triennial) International Symposium of the MOS. This year: * Ben Cousins and Santosh Vempala […]
Professors Yin Tat Lee and Thomas Rothvoss are faculty at the Allen School of the University of Washington. Lee has the A.W. Tucker Prize that recognizes the best doctoral thesis in optimization in the past three years. Rothvoss, who holds a dual appointment in the Allen School and the Department of Mathematics, earned the Delbert […]
Foundations of Computer Science 2024 is coming this fall: October 27-30, 2024 at Wolf Point Plaza, Chicago. A Bit of History The cover of the FOCS proceedings is: It was designed by Alvy Ray Smith—many years ago. See his comments here. I was asked by my colleagues at the IBM Watson Research Center to design […]
Sadly Gordon Bell died May 17 at the age of 89, see this. Bell died in Coronado, California from pneumonia. He was a true visionary in the world of computing who helped design some of the first minicomputers in the 1960s. Much will be written about his life and legacy, but his technical contributions were […]