(This post was inspired by George Foreman, who passed away March 21, 2025, at the age of 76.)| Computational Complexity
I've heard this story from a few places. A father watches Back to the Future II with his kid. The 1989 movie view of 2015 looks entirely different when in fact not much has changed except for the fashion and the lack of mobile phones. This is supposed to be a parable about the lack of technological progress.| Computational Complexity
Tom Lehrer passed away on July 26, 2025, at the age of 97. I wrote a blog-obit here. One of my readers read the post and went down a rabbit hole (or did he?), which lead to a blog post about rabbit holes here. | Computational Complexity
Last month the New York Times highlighted some AI generated short movies, including Total Pixel Space , by Jacob Adler that gets philosophi...| blog.computationalcomplexity.org
Computational Complexity and other fun stuff in math and computer science from Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch| blog.computationalcomplexity.org
We start our favorite theorems of the last decade with a blockbuster improvement in a long-standing problem. Graph Isomorphism in Quasipol...| blog.computationalcomplexity.org
Computational Complexity and other fun stuff in math and computer science from Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch| blog.computationalcomplexity.org
NICK: I read and enjoyed your blog post on Tom L (see here). I then spend 40 minutes down a rabbithole listening to his music on YouTube.| Computational Complexity
AI and Vacation| Computational Complexity
Tom Lehrer passed away on Saturday July 26 at the age of 97. (For other obits see this collection of ten obits here .) He worked in both of...| blog.computationalcomplexity.org
Computational Complexity and other fun stuff in math and computer science from Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch| blog.computationalcomplexity.org
A guest post by Eric Allender prompted by an (incorrect) P ≠ NP proof recently published in Springer Nature's Frontiers of Computer Scie...| blog.computationalcomplexity.org
Computational Complexity and other fun stuff in math and computer science from Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch| blog.computationalcomplexity.org
In a prior post I asked what criteria I used to place Prez and VP nominees since 1976 into two groups. | Computational Complexity
A new prize:| Computational Complexity
I am curious how AI or humans can do on the following question.| Computational Complexity
Douglas Hofstadter first published Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid in 1979 and my then high school self tried, and failed, to read though the entire book. It focused on the contradictions, with Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems, M. C. Escher's Drawing Hands and Johann Sebastian Bach's Canon a 2 per tonos, a piece that keeps rising until it ends a whole tone higher than it started.| Computational Complexity
UMCP has a building named | Computational Complexity
I had an epiphany reading an article in the Trenton Times when I lived in New Jersey at the turn of the century. The article interviewed com...| blog.computationalcomplexity.org
We denote the busy beaver function by BB.| Computational Complexity
A new dean has taken my place, and I have returned to the professoriate at Illinois Tech, ending thirteen years in administration, six as dean and seven as department chair at Georgia Tech. I won't rule out more administrative roles in the future, but only if the right role presents itself.| Computational Complexity
(I wrote this post a while back so its no longer NEW. More important--- if there has been a follow-up to the story that is not in my post, let me know.) | Computational Complexity
Alberto Fraile and Daniel Fernández guest post on random walks generated by the distribution of prime numbers.| Computational Complexity
The Univ of MD at College Park holds a HS Math Competition every year. At the reception for the winners Professor Larry Washington points t...| blog.computationalcomplexity.org
Computational Complexity and other fun stuff in math and computer science from Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch| blog.computationalcomplexity.org
As the entire Fulbright board resigned last week and as the program that promotes international visits for US researchers, and vice-versa, may not survive the Trump administration, I thought I would recount some memories from my Fulbright scholarship to the Netherlands in 1996-97.| Computational Complexity
A year ago if I showed you a picture of The Pope wearing a Baseball cap for the Chicago White Sox (or any Amercan team) you would assume it was computer-generated. And you would likely be right. | Computational Complexity
In the June CACM, Micah Beck writes an opinion piece Accept the Consequences where he is quite skeptical of the role of theory in real-worl...| blog.computationalcomplexity.org
David Zuckerman The 2025 Gödel Prize has been awarded to Eshan Chattopadhyay and David Zuckerman for their paper Explicit two-source extrac...| blog.computationalcomplexity.org
You can write laws that are very specific, like the US tax code, or open to interpretation like the first amendment. In the literature these are known as rules and standards respectively. | Computational Complexity
(Thanks to David Marcus who sent me the video I point to in point 4 of this post. Tip for young bloggers (if there are any) you can have a half-baked idea for a post and then someone sends you something OR you later have an idea to make it a full-baked idea for a post. That's what happened here. So keep track of your half-baked ideas.)| Computational Complexity
Lance's post on Babai's result on Graph Isomorphism (henceforth GI) inspired some random thoughts on GI. (Lance's post is here .) 1) Here ...| blog.computationalcomplexity.org
The New Pope is Pope Leo XIV (pre-Pope name is Robert Prevost). 1) Pope names are one of the few places we still use Roman Numerals. I sa...| blog.computationalcomplexity.org
As we hit five years from when the world shut down, lots of discussions on how Covid has changed society. What about academia and computer s...| blog.computationalcomplexity.org
In the book Those Fascinating Numbers by Jean-Marie De Konick they find interesting (or `interesting') things to say about many numbers. I ...| blog.computationalcomplexity.org