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From Computational Complexity

Our Obsession with Proofs

Bullinger's post on this blog last week focused on Vijay Vazirani's public obsession of finding a proof for the 1980 Micali-Vazirani matching algorithm. But why...

From Computational Complexity

Is Persistence an Anachronism?

Guest post by Martin BullingerVery recently, Vijay Vazirani's paper A Theory of Alternating Paths and Blossoms, from the Perspective of Minimum Length got accepted...

From Computational Complexity

Favorite Theorems: Quantum Provers

For our next favorite theorem, we look at the surprising power of provers who share entangled bits. If you can prove something to an arbitrarily computable verifier...

From Computational Complexity

Avi wins the Turing Award

The ACM announced that Avi Wigderson, a force in computational complexity and beyond, will receive the 2023 A. M. Turing Award (Quanta article). This is the first...

From Computational Complexity

The Softening of Computing Jobs: Blip or Trend?

Tech companies are performing exceptionally well, driving the S&P 500 to new heights with their soaring stock prices. However, the tech sector, apart from AI, expects...

From Computational Complexity

Can you feel the machine?

In the recent academy award winning movie Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr tests a young Oppenheimer. Bohr: Algebra's like sheet music, the important thing isn't canOppenheimer...

From Computational Complexity

Translation in Context

La Scala in Milan Google translate generally impresses but consider this translation from a short Italian news article. I boldfaced a few items. Not scheduled...

From Computational Complexity

Favorite Theorems: Sensitivity

Our next favorite theorem gave a relatively simple proof of the sensitivity conjecture, a long-standing problem of Boolean functions.Induced subgraphs of hypercubes...

From Computational Complexity

A Quantum State

Illinois' most famous citizen working on a quantum computer The governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, unveiled his budget last week including $500 million for quantum...

From Computational Complexity

Sumchecks and Snarks

Last summer as I lamented that my research didn't have real world implications, one of the comments mentioned the sumcheck protocol used for zero-knowledge SNARKs...

From Computational Complexity

Focusing on the Outcomes

An academic field often organizes itself pulling ideas from its own field. For example, students on the economics faculty job search can signal at most two schools...

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...
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