Richard Lipton had a wonderful post asking for a seventh Millennium Prize now that Poincare's conjecture has been solved. I posted a suggestion on his blog but...
Considerable discussion about funding at CRA Snowbird. Ken Gabriel, Deputy Director of DARPA, talked about how DARPA is restructuring its programs to become...
I just returned home from my first trip to the CRA Snowbird Conference, the biannual meeting of CS chairs and other leaders in the CS community. I really...
I will be sending my next book review column for SIGACT NEWS off on July 28, 2010. It has LOTS of books on its BOOKS I WANT REVIEWED list. YOU get a chance to...
The Job Market in Theory (likely in all of academia) has more randomness and arbitrariness (are those the same?) then people may realize. Especially young...
What do you get out of this paragraph (from Charlie Stross' The Atrocity Archives via Daniel Lemire) The [Turing] theorem is a hack on discrete number theory...
(This post is similar to this old post. I am posting this anyway since when I first posted I made fundamental mistake. I fixed it the point I was trying to...
Last week, the Center for Computational Intractability hosted a Geometric Complexity Theory Workshop. Geometric complexity theory (GCT) is an approach to P vs...
- Is it possible for someone to be denied Full Prof? Yes, but it is rare. - Is it possible for someone to fail a PhD defense? Yes, but it is rare. These...
a conflict-of-interest? Some thoughts. Thought One PROF: I can't vote on Professor X's Full Prof case since I have a conflict. CHAIRMAN: (There are not that...
At a CCC Council meeting last week, a common theme emerged. The Army is "swimming with sensors and drowning in data". Biologists are considering trashing some...
Within CS theory who ended up at what jobs? Neither Lance nor I knows this. But YOU do--- collectively! So, I ask you, the readers, to leave comments about who...
FOCS accepts, abstracts and PDFs. The conference itself will be held October 23-26 in Las Vegas. There is a proposed TCS version of Math Overflow, a Q&A site...
Consider the following problem: A hole is drilled through the center of a sphere. The cylinder-with-caps is removed. The length of the removed cylinder (it ...
Nicole Immorlica reports on the NSF CISE Broader Impacts Summit held last week in DC. We've all seen it. Most of us have even written one. I'm talking about ...
Some random thoughts about quiz shows. THOUGHT ONE: There could be a quiz show based on P and NP. We all think that FINDING an answer is harder than VERIFYING...
There was a Women in Theory Workshop at Princeton From June 19-23. ***SORELLE***, who was there, has some intelligent and interesting things to say about it...
How to best describe what we do to the layperson? It depends on what you mean by layperson. I was in Austin Texas visiting my nephew Jason. I was also giving a...
I set up a new blog, Future of STOC to discuss role of our main conference and how to achieve it. At STOC this year we had a relatively large attendance of 350...
(Guest Post by Vijay Vazirani) Foundational ... or Simply a Curiosity? Conventional wisdom has it that whereas linear programs have rational solutions,...
( Reminder:Deadline for submitting to special issue of Theory of Computing in honor of Rajeev Motwani is July 30. See here. ) CCC 2010! - Ran Raz gave an...
László Lovász wins the Kyoto Prize for "Outstanding Contributions to Mathematical Sciences Based on Discrete Optimization Algorithms." -- Posted By Lance to...
(Will post on Complexity next week. I am waiting until the invited talks have their slides online so that I can point to them.) Lets say you just got a PhD in...
Now that teaching has ended I plan to focus again on my P v NP book. I won't go on a full blog sabbatical, instead I'll aim to post once a week as well as keep...
(I will post about CCC 2010 later in the week.) The word Game is used in many different contexts within math and computer science. I list out all that a group...
I called home last night and my daughter Molly had an exciting story to tell. She was at her friend Danielle's house (the same Molly and Danielle from the...
Tomorrow I'm off to Cambridge, MA for the 42nd Symposium on the Theory of Computing (STOC), the 25th Conference on Computational Complexity (CCC) and the 11th...
In the latest CACM, Jilin Chen and Joseph Konstan analyze data from the ACM DL and conclude that low-acceptance rate conference have papers with higher impact...
A reader from Mexico asks I am a near-to-be graduate student from Computational Engineering. However, it wasn't what I expected from my career. I want to be a ...
Toronto Professor Avner Magen died in a climbing accident on Saturday. He's had a number of important results on a variety of algorithmic topics. Avner was one...
