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dateMore Than a Year Ago
authorLance Fortnow
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From Computational Complexity

I read the news today oh boy

I'm absolutely elated that Lázló Lovász and Avi Wigderson won the Abel Prize. More from the New York Times, Quanta Magazine and Gil Kalai. Another example ofspa...

From Computational Complexity

Cake Cutting in Overtime

There's a new proposal out of Baltimore for a new way to handle overtime in National Football League games. This post is about American Football, soccer has its...

From Computational Complexity

Complexity is the Enemy of Speed

The title of this post came from an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday on vaccine distribution. Many attempts to get the vaccines to the right groups...

From Computational Complexity

A Blood Donation Puzzle

In the US you can donate whole blood every eight weeks. Suppose Elvira does exactly that. Will she hit every date of the year? For example, if Elvira gave blood...

From Computational Complexity

PhDs and Green Cards

Joe Biden's immigration policy has some interesting policies for PhDs. Biden will exempt from any cap recent graduates of PhD programs in STEM fields in the U.S...

From Computational Complexity

Alan Selman (1941-2021)

From a 1994 Dagstuhl Workshop. Selman is the one wearing a cap. Alan Selman, one of the early leaders in structural complexity and the co-founder and first chair...

From Computational Complexity

The Ethics Board

Back in 2014 I recommended a TCS ethics board mainly to deal with plagiarism and who should get credit for a result. It went the way of most suggestions I makeasked...

From Computational Complexity

Complexity Year in Review 2020

For the result of the year we go to all they way back to the "before times". MIP*=RE by Zhengfeng Ji, Anand Natarajan, Thomas Vidick, John Wright and Henry YuenA...

From Computational Complexity

Slowest Sorting Algorithms

Radu Gigore tweeted "People are obsessed with finding the best algorithms. What about the worst?" So here's a Christmas gift that keeps giving, the slowest of sorting...

From Computational Complexity

Optiland

Many of you have heard of Russell Impagliazzo's five worlds from his 1995 classic A personal view of average-case complexity In short  Algorithmica: P = NP orHeuristica...

From Computational Complexity

Shuffling Around

In the fall of 1983 as a junior at Cornell I took CS 481, Introduction to the Theory of Computing, from Juris Hartmanis. Needless to say this was the course that...

From Computational Complexity

Chess is Back

Back in 2005, I wrote a post titled Chess and Poker. Not really comparing the two but noting that Chess had lost its mojo while poker had high-stakes prime time...

From Computational Complexity

Vaughan Jones and Kaikoura

Vaughan Jones, one of the greatest mathematicians from New Zealand, passed away on September 6 at 67. Jones is an expert in knot theory among other areas and received...

From Computational Complexity

Recovery

Lance: Perhaps we should do a post-election vidcast--what does it mean for complexity!Bill: Not sure if you are serious- but I doubt a Biden presidency will either...

From Computational Complexity

2020 Fall Jobs Post

My annual fall jobs posts, giving advice to PhDs looking for faculty positions, were getting repetitive. See last year's post for the usual stuff and feel freeTaulbee...

From Computational Complexity

50 Years of PBS

The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) launched fifty years ago this month in the United States. The New York Times talks about its fifty reasons how the network...

From Computational Complexity

MIP* = RE Redux

Everything pre-covid seems at least five years ago to me, so it's hard to believe that MIP* = RE is a 2020 result. To remind you, consider the model where we have...

From Computational Complexity

Remembering 2000

FOCS 2000 took place in Redondo Beach, just south of Los Angeles, November 12-14. Certainly some great results such as the Reingold-Vadhan-Wigderson Zig-Zag Graph...

From Computational Complexity

Simons Institute Gets Another Decade

 Great news out of the Simons Institute.The Simons Foundation has ensured a second decade of research and innovation for the Simons Institute for the Theory ofcollection...

From Computational Complexity

Virtual Complexity

The Complexity Complexity Conference, the conference that shares its name and URL with this blog, originally scheduled for Saarbrücken will be held virtually next...
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