The Chicago White Sox have raised their championship banner and started a new season. A team wins the World Series, their first in 88 years, and the main story...
Ten years ago today federal agents went to a remote cabin outside Lincoln, Montana to arrest one Theodore Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber . Just a...
From an assistant professor comes a question How many Ph.D. students should a professor advise? There is no single answer. The usual constraints are time and ...
From Jay Leno's monologue on Monday's Tonight Show Scientists have been working on a device that will tell when you are boring or irritating in social...
When you are asked to referee a paper you need to follow a set of ethical guidelines that are rarely spelled out and often ignored. Here are the rules as I see...
A good reader question. I was curious if you had any discussions on what kind of math background new graduate students need to have? For instance, if the ...
The EATCS has announced the winners of the Gdel Prize: Manindra Agrawal, Neeraj Kayal and Nitin Saxena for their paper Primes in P . I started this weblog...
Microsoft just announced their Academic Search , a direct competitor to Google Scholar . Scholar is incredibly useful at tracking down electronic versions of...
The iCal standard allows sharing of events and calendars. The standard has been around for many years and has been popular with Apple users but the new Google...
Venkat Guruswami talked at TTI last week giving an overview of recent work in list decoding. Someone asked him about practical applications of his work and he...
March Edition In 1976, Juris Hartmanis and Leonard Berman defined the isomorphism conjecture: For all pairs of NP-complete sets there is a reduction from one...
A few days ago I put a look of horror into one of our graduate students when I went up to him and simply said "You should be careful about what you write in...
Luca and his commentors get dreamy-eyed over Berkeley but not everyone has such fond memories of that place. I arrived in Berkeley for graduate school in...
An anonymous graduate student asks Why do theory students have to take systems courses? Most American Ph.D. programs have distributions requirements where ...
"which also gives better heuristics for the Traveling Salesman Problem." "Don't you mean the Traveling Sales person Problem?" "No, the Traveling Salesman...
Tomorrow marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of combinatorialist Richard Rado . Rado is the second most famous mathematician born on April 28, 1906 so...
Kurt Gdel came into our world one hundred years ago today. Gdel's incompleteness theorems changed the way we think about mathematics. We reprint the...
If you have an academic job offer, what next? Don't forget to negotiate. I wrote a post on negotiating last fall and in particular you should read the ...
Bob Soare, who wrote one of the great textbooks on recursion theory and then almost single-handedly changed the name of the field to computability theory, ...
For a talk I wanted to show a map of the United States using four colors with the usual constraint that every pair of states that share a common border have...
A panel at the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the US should support Fermilab's bid to land the International Linear Collider. via Chicago Sun-Times...
Luca and Oded talk about rejection. Here are some thoughts. Rejection hurts. Academics thrive on earning the respect of their peers and it's tough to think...
A computer science paper goes through many phases: manuscript, technical report, conference submission and proceedings and journal submission and published...
Ehud Kalai proposes renaming the Game Theory Society to the Game Science Society and welcomes your comments. The goal of changing the name of the society is to...
This Monday May 15th is the early registration deadline for this year's Conference on Computational Complexity in Prague. The early registration date for the...
Suppose we could create a system where all automobile traffic in the US would be controlled by a central computer system. Traffic would flow more smoothly,...
How could I not blog about Jonathan Farley's op-ed piece The NSA's Math Problem ? Farley looks at the NSA's use of phone data as and argues that using graph...
Via CRA Bulletin the 2004-2005 Taulbee Survey has been posted. A wealth of statistics about computer science in the US and Canada. The charts fall into several...
April Edition For many years the standard example of a probabilistic algorithm checked whether a number was prime. Riemann's Hypothesis and Tests for Primality...