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From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP

Bias In The Primes

Casinos beware—the primes are not random Quanta source (K.S. at left) Robert Lemke Oliver and Kannan Soundararajan have observed that the primes fail some simple...

From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP

Happy St. Patrick’s Day

A trick of language and echoing Neil L. is a Leprechaun. He has been visiting me once every year since I started GLL. I had never seen a leprechaun before I began...

From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP

One Flip Sends Many Bits

Another coins on a chessboard puzzle Cropped from Ashley’s TwiCopy source Hou Yifan and Maurice Ashley are champions of chess in several senses. Hou just regained...

From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP

Stonefight at the Goke Corral

Will there be any man left standing? Sensei’s Library player bio source Lee Sedol of South Korea, who is currently ranked #4 on the unofficial GoRatings list, may...

From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP

David Johnson: 1945-2016

David just passed away David Johnson was a computer theorist who worked on many things, with special emphasis on the care and treatment of hard computational problems...

From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP

A Matter of Agreement

On the 2015 Turing Award Mirror image of source Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman, and Ralph Merkle publicly broke the yoke of symmetry in cryptography in the 1970s...

From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP

The Pierce-Birkhoff Conjecture

A kind of hierarchy collapse? Cropped from father-son bio source Garrett Birkhoff was a mathematician who is best known for his research on lattices, and also his...

From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP

Coins on a Chessboard

A 35-year-old puzzle with extras DeLong Lecture Series source Maxim Kontsevich has established deep connections between algebraic geometry and mechanisms of physics...

From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP

Waves, Hazards, and Guesses

Some matters of gravity in science Moshe Vardi is famous for many things, including his brilliant turn as the Editor-in-Chief of the Communications of the ACM....

From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP

Magic To Do

Can we avoid accepting what we cannot verify? Cropped from biography source Arthur Clarke was a British writer of great breadth and huge impact. He was a science...

From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP

The 2016 Knuth Prize

A non-annoucement annoucement Crop from Farkas Prize src Michel Goemans is the chair of this year’s ACM/IEEE Knuth Prize committee. He teaches at MIT and among...

From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP

Minsky The Theorist

Marvin Minsky’s contributions to complexity theory Cropped from BBC feature on AI Marvin Minsky, sad to relate, passed away last Sunday. He was one of the great...

From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP

A Chess Firewall at Zero?

We halve our blunder rate when infinitesimally ahead, but why? Crop from Seneca chess quote source Lucius Seneca was a Roman playwright, philosopher, and statesman...

From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP

Did Euclid Really Mean ‘Random’?

Euclid writes randomness into his Elements Cropped from source (Garrett Coakley) Euclid is, of course, the Greek mathematician, who is often referred to as the...

From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP

You Think We Have Problems

Some hard problems in philosophy Wikimedia Commons source Loki is a Jötunn or ss in Norse mythology, who, legend has it, once made a bet with some dwarves. He bet...

From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP

Blasts From the Past

Is the “Forsch” awakening in complexity theory? Composite of src1, src2, src3 Max von Sydow starred as the chess-playing knight in Ingmar Bergman’s iconic 1957...

From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP

A Game On Infinite Trees

An independent principle in set theory Cropped from Oberwolfach source Ronald Jensen is a famous set theorist who was a past president of the Kurt Gödel Society...

From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP

Permutation Problems With Strings

From “Parsons Puzzles” to Babai’s breakthrough, and more? NZ silver fern source: Robin Ducker (CC) Dale Parsons and Patricia Haden, of Otago Polytechnic in New...

From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP

Thanks for Additivity

A mathematical metaphor for progress Cropped from source Nicole Oresme was a fourteenth-century polymath. He lived in France and became an advisor to King Charles...

From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP

A Little More on the Graph Isomorphism Algorithm

Looking at some of its components From source, our congrats too Laci Babai’s first talk a week ago Tuesday is now a webcast here. There is also a great detailed...
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