George Dantzig passed away last Friday. In the 1940s Dantzig invented linear programming and developed the simplex method for solving LP. Simplex works well in...
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May 19, 2005 11:44 am
I was 13 when I went to see the first Star Wars movie on opening weekend in 1977 in New York City when it was just called "Star Wars" without a subtitle or...
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May 20, 2005 2:02 pm
Most US universities have ended their academic year and moved into the summer season. I like summer not so much for the weather (it gets hot and muggy in...
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May 23, 2005 12:00 am
I'm liveblogging the business meeting. Keep it here. -- Posted by Lance to Computational Complexity at 5/22/2005 06:58:00 PM...
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May 23, 2005 1:22 pm
My liveblogging experiment didn't quite work as planned. I seemed to have lost half of what I wrote and then my battery died. So here is some basic info from...
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May 25, 2005 6:37 pm
A Chicago undergrad Amanda Redlich gave a presentation and used the shorthand ity (Complex-ity). Clever. Of course this should never be confused with ity. ...
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May 26, 2005 10:35 pm
Ravi Kumar and D. Sivakumar, the local organizers of the upcoming Conference on Computational Complexity in San Jose, ask that I post the following. I hope to...
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May 28, 2005 11:59 am
My cell phone received a breaking new alert yesterday: The FDA is investigating a link between the impotence drug Viagra and blindness . The story also made...
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May 31, 2005 2:50 am
The quality of conference presentations have, on average, much improved over the past decade or two. Why? Certainly technological improvements like PowerPoint...
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Jun 1, 2005 1:38 pm
Language has never been my strong suit. I didn't speak full sentences until I was five. I had a 220 point spread between my verbal and math SAT scores. I...
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Jun 2, 2005 11:16 am
Two great open questions from the early 70's: Is PNP? Who was Deep Throat? Now that we know the answer to the latter, can a resolution of P versus NP be far ...
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Jun 3, 2005 11:31 am
Toda's famous theorem states that the polynomial-time hierarchy reduces to counting problems (in complexity terms PH P #P ). His proof uses two lemmas: PHBPP P...
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Jun 6, 2005 2:27 pm
An old math joke: Three friends from college went on to become a doctor, lawyer and a mathematicians. They met back at reunion and the discussion went to ...
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Jun 8, 2005 3:18 am
Should you have jokes in talks? Too much humor can detract from your real work but a little laughter can lighten up an otherwise dry presentation. You must use...
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Jun 8, 2005 11:21 pm
Jeff Erickson makes an important point in his post on the SoCG (Computational Geometry) business meeting. Links and emphasis are his. Finally, and most...
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Jun 10, 2005 2:47 pm
The University of Chicago has four graduation convocations in the spring quarter spread throughout today and tomorrow. The first session (mostly law students)...
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Jun 13, 2005 1:41 pm
Howdy from the 20 th IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity in San Jose, California. Last night we had a short business meeting with beer and wine but...
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Jun 14, 2005 2:04 pm
Yesterday Manuel Blum gave the invited talk on Understanding "Understanding:" Steps towards a Mathematical Scientific Theory of Consciousness . He started with...
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Jun 16, 2005 1:16 pm
As the long computer science recruiting season has pretty much finished we go around conference like STOC and Complexity asking "Where will you be next year?"...
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Jun 19, 2005 2:23 am
Chris Barwick (aka optionsScalper ) is a fan of Euler and tracked down my academic legacy back to Euler and Gauss through many other great mathematicians. Of...
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Jun 21, 2005 12:07 am
May Edition The Equivalence Problem for Regular Expressions with Squaring Requires Exponential Space by Albert Meyer and Larry Stockmeyer, FOCS (then called...
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Jun 22, 2005 12:23 pm
A famous complexity theorist once said "The hardest part of being an advisor is not working on your student's problems." Good open problems are quite rare and...
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Jun 23, 2005 11:34 am
Rarely do people notice the true technological breakthroughs in science fiction and fantasy movies. Roger Ebert gets it in his review of the rather silly...
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Jun 24, 2005 12:23 pm
On May 13 in the US, the Star Trek franchise (temporarily?) ends 18 straight years of first-run episodes. Bill Gasarch comments. About a month ago was the...
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Jun 27, 2005 10:47 am
A unique game consists of an undirected connected graph G=(V,E), a color set C, and for each edge {i,j} with i<j a permutation i,j :CC. A coloring of the graph...
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Jun 28, 2005 11:17 am
Theory Matters points to a definition of Theoretical Computer Science given on the SIGACT Home Page . The field of theoretical computer science is interpreted...
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Jun 30, 2005 12:15 am
The list of accepted papers for the upcoming FOCS Conference has been posted (via Suresh via Bacon ). Given recent comments the Internet really raises...
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Jun 30, 2005 9:15 pm
Sanjeev Arora asked the "theory blogs" to take up the issue of finding a few new challenges of theory that one can sell to nonspecialists and congressional...
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Jul 4, 2005 2:53 am
Old Joke: Is there a fourth of July in Canada? Sure there is, right between the third of July and the fifth of July. Outside of the US the Fourth has no...
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Jul 5, 2005 1:00 pm
The great game theorist Robert Aumann writes about consciousness . Sometimes, people express perplexity as to the nature of the problem. They do not see...
