On May 10, 1950, Harry Truman signed Public Law 507 creating the National Science Foundation based on Vannevar Bush's Science - The Endless Frontier. The NSF...
In March David Pennock promoted Computer Science as STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) a takeoff on STEM. There are aspects of...
The list of COLT papers are posted here. Carl Smith claimed that COLT was made possible because of THREE strands of learning theory coming together to form a...
In The Honeymooners episode that aired on Oct 1, 1955 Ralph Kramden does not want to buy a TV set because I'm waiting for 3D TV. He could be called the...
Many of my fellow CS theorists are surprisingly technophobes. Don't own a cell phone. Begrudgingly got a credit card but still refuse to buy anything online....
Robin Milner died on March 20, 2010. For obits see here and here. A review of his most recent book will be in a future SIGACT NEWS book review column; however,...
In the April CACM, George V. Neville-Neil wrote a column on a question about the foundations of computer science: In most areas of science there are a few...
Announcements: - STOC Early Registration closes on April 30. STOC itself is June 6,7,8. - CCC Early Registration closes May 3. CCC itself is June 9,10,11. - EC...
(REMINDERS: STOC Early Registration closes on April 30. CCC Early Registration closes May 3. EC Early Registration closes on May 6. ) Here is a problem whose...
Since the beginning of complexity we talked about time complexity t(n) as a function of the input size. But it has been the inverse of this function that we...
If you want to find something out you can ask Google, ask an expert, or (if you have a blog) ask your readers. Google is the most common; however, there are...
On Monday Richard Lipton wrote a nice piece on the work of Emil Post, a famous logician who had great results and even greater questions in the early days of...
Pangrams are sentences that contain every letter of the alphabet. The classic is The quick brown fox jumped over a lazy dog. There are more here. Palindromes...
A reminder that registration for all three Cambridge conferences are now live: STOC (early registration deadline April 30), Complexity (May 3) and Electronic...
The following is from an Ask Marilyn Column. I paraphrase this since its from memory. READER'S LETTER: I have heard of exams where you are penalized for ...
So I broke down and bought the iPad. Many people have asked whether the iPad is worth buying. The short answer: It will be. There are many many iPad reviews...
The Lovász Local Lemma (LLL), slightly simplified, states that: Given a set of “bad” events, if for every event A there exists a subset of events with...
April 9 was Tom Lehrer's 82nd birthday! To celebrate I give you breaking news that a Tom L DVD was released April 13, 2010. It seems to have some videos of him...
Besides being tax day, Thursday is the deadline to decide where to attend graduate school. How should you choose? I've blogged on this topic before but a few...
In discrete math (or other courses) we teach AND DERIVE the formula for 1+2+3+...+n. We then look at the sum 12+22+...+n2. Here there are some options. - State...
In January I gave a Distinguished Lecture in the CS Department at the University of Alberta. In early March I gave essentially the same lecture at Penn State...
(Looking for a roomate for STOC. Check out this site..) Baseball Season started this week. I want to point out that Baseball violates mathematics in two ways. ...
In my April Fools Day Post I said the following: Here are problems that I believe can be solved with current techniques. That was indeed true- since they were...
Last fall I wrote about the different focus on models and proofs in the Econ and CS theory communities. Today I'll focus on the purpose of a model and what...
I don't remember what prompted it but about a month ago I tweeted Your paper might appear on Arxiv or ECCC, be widely read and even well cited. But don't think...
STOC conference and hotel registration now live. Early registration deadline is April 30th. Registration for Complexity and Electronic Commerce coming soon....
We complexity theorists seem more concerned with proving that we can't prove things than with actually proving things!!!! There have been two workshop on...
ACM announced the following awards recently. Note that some of the awards are named after theorists and some awards went to theorists. Any comments on their...
Three recent happenings made me think about the amount I travel. - I hit the 50K club (Premier Executive) in United for the first time last year. At first I...
