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authorLance Fortnow
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From Computational Complexity

Favorite Theorems: Graph Isomorphism

We start our favorite theorems of the last decade with a blockbuster improvement in a long-standing problem. Graph Isomorphism in Quasipolynomial Time by László...

From Computational Complexity

University Challenges

Seems like US universities have been in the news quite a bit recently. You'd think for the great academics and research. Alas, no.I decided to make a list of the...

From Computational Complexity

Learning Complexity on Your Own

The following request came from a comment earlier this month (shortened) Could you give some advice on how to study complexity theory on one's own, and/or to follow...

From Computational Complexity

Offer Timing

In most academic fields, departments, either formally or informally, have their interviews and make their junior faculty offers at about the same time. Facultytackled...

From Computational Complexity

Favorite Theorems 2015-2024

In 1994, the FST&TCS conference invited me to give a talk at their meeting in Madras (now Chennai). I was in my tenth year as a complexity theorists since I started...

From Computational Complexity

2023 Complexity Year in Review

Result of the year goes to Polynomial-Time Pseudodeterministic Construction of PrimesLijie Chen, Zhenjian Lu, Igor C. Oliveira, Hanlin Ren and Rahul SanthanamAn...

From Computational Complexity

Respect

I've generally avoided talking about all the events at college campuses in the last few months that came to a head at the congressional hearings last week that...

From Computational Complexity

Do We Need to Formalize?

Back in the 1990s I explored the system Nuprl for formalizing mathematical proofs. We had a theoretical paper on quickly checking a proof and I wanted to see if...

From Computational Complexity

The Engineer and The Computer Scientist

What is the difference between engineering and computer science? CS is not an engineering field, though there is some overlap. It's not the digital versus physical...

From Computational Complexity

War Games

With the self-destruction of OpenAI well underway, Friday night I watched the movie War Games for the first time since the 80s. Quick synopsis (spoilers): NORAD...

From Computational Complexity

Inverting a Function

With the STOC deadline this last Monday, a number of complexity papers have appeared on arXiV and ECCC. Two caught my eye because they seem to independently prove...

From Computational Complexity

Othello. Solved.

The perfect game Back in the 1980s, a high school friend and I created Excalibur, a computer othello program that I've posted about before. Even on an OG IBMannounced...

From Computational Complexity

The Loop Graph

  Locals refer to downtown Chicago as "The Loop" because of a rectangle of elevated (or "El") train tracks that create a loop through the area first built in An...

From Computational Complexity

Saving Grace

The Grace Hopper Conference has grown to one of the largest in computer science, pushing past 25,000 attendees. Most women in computing, whether a student, faculty...

From Computational Complexity

Fall Jobs Post 2023

In the 2022 Fall Jobs Post I talked about the effect of generative AI and that was two weeks before Open AI released ChatGPT to the public. A year later, how will...

From Computational Complexity

Measuring Quantum Progress

In August the Google Quantum AI Team posted a blog post How to compare a noisy quantum processor to a classical computer to measure progress in building quantum...

From Computational Complexity

The Lyadov Lesson

I've seen many brilliant students, those who flew though high school and undergrad with great grades and little effort. As PhD students, they often feel they still...

From Computational Complexity

Half-Exponential No More

I've mentioned Kannan's proof that \(\Sigma_2^p\) does not have \(n^2\) size-circuits before. A similar proof shows that \(\Sigma_2^E = \mathrm{NTIME}^\mathrm{NP}...

From Computational Complexity

We Must Be Doing Something Right

The Chicago Tribune ran an editorial Monday that started What’s the best four-year college in Illinois? Not the University of Chicago, Northwestern University or...

From Computational Complexity

Mr. Jaeger and The Scroll

There were three major influencers in my educational journey: Mike Sipser, my PhD advisor at Berkeley and MIT, Juris Hartmanis who founded the field of computational...
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