(Guest Post by Dave Doty pointing to a blog by ***SORELLE*** which points to a roomate finding service for conferences.) Sorelle has announced a new roommate...
Yesterday I posted a list of books that I want reviews of as SIGACT NEWS Book Review Column Editor. This resulted in an unintentional study of Sociology and...
I have been the SIGACT NEWS Book Review Column Editor for a while now. Every issue I have a list of books that I WANT reviewed. This works pretty well, but I...
Lance: Welcome to our second typecast on the last full day of Dagstuhl. I may not see Bill for a while so we'd thought we'd get in one more chat before we go...
In the 1990's Manindra Agrawal and V. Arvind published a paper claiming that if SAT is reducible to a (non-uniform) weighted threshold function then P = NP....
Lance: Because we don't have a good microphone, Bill and I decided to have our first typecast. Hi Bill. Bill: Hi Lance. We'll be typecast SUPERSTARS. L: What's...
The talks Monday were after my own heart. The day started with relativization: The always entertaining Scott Aaronson talked on his approach to get an oracle...
This week Bill and I are both at the Dagstuhl Workshop on Algebraic Methods in Computation Complexity. I'll try to cover some of the talks and discussions on...
Bill and I battle it out over what should be taught in a complexity course. -- Posted By Lance to Computational Complexity at 10/09/2009 11:11:00 AM...
On the New York Times website, John Markoff writes an article Prizes Aside, the P-NP Puzzler has Consequences motivated by my CACM article on The Status of the...
The book Prime Obsessions has the following on Page 159: You will see it written that Hadamard was the last of the universal mathematicians--- the last, that...
When you get an invitation via email should you accept? How well targeted is it? Some real examples that I got. EXAMPLE ONE: I would like to invite you to...
In a prior post (a while back) I pondered if Mahaney's theorem (SAT \le_m S, S Spare, implies P=NP) should be taught in a basic grad course in complexity. I...
In a tweet a few days ago, David Baconwonders why everyone always assumes all he can do is quantum computing? Oh, because that's all he's done. Time to do...
Reminder: FOCS early registration deadline today. Go here Below is a revised version of the Journal Manifesto. I restate the key sentence from my last post and...
Some people say that for-profit journals do not currently serve our community well. Some even think they cannot do so. Others think they are doing a fine job...
My family has discovered a British Series, the IT Crowd, about two techies in a corporate IT department. An American version never got past the pilot phase. ...
One of the comments of the last post asked my (or someones) opinion on the proofs floating around that P=NP or P\ne NP. - As a grad student I used to read...
A reader writes I come to you by way of your computational complexity blog. I get that there is some really good stuff there, but frankly don’t understand...
There have been several posts on blogs about P vs NP and two expository articles. Is there anything else to add. I'm not sure, but here are my 2 cents. -...
(Posted by request of Vijay V. Vazirani. Flame him for any spelling or grammar mistakes, or if you don't like the content.) Another reason to goto FOCS: There...
Nearly three years ago I posted on the just announced Netflix prize. First to a 10% increase in the quality of the movie recommendations would receive a...
You can now register on-line for FOCS which includes the 50th celebration. Early registration deadline is October 1. Hotel rate good until October 9th or while...
Google has acquired reCAPTCHA, Luis von Ahn's project to use humans to aid transcribing old documents. We consider Luis an honorary theorist and congrats for...
In the book The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks there is a true story about two twin brothers (John and Michael),...
There is another Theory Blogger: Silent Glen. How can a blogger by silent? Sounds like a contradiction in terms! Hope its not a contradiction since she is...
A student asks "How do you survive in the academic world if what you want to do is not fashionable?" You shouldn't necessarily focus your research on the...
I recently heard or read the following phrases. - former cop killer - ideal compromiser - even prime numbers have their uses In each case it was ambiguous. The...
The story goes that Andrew Wiles dreamt of proving Fermat's last theorem when he was a kid. No surprise since all of us math-loving kids dreamed of solving...
