Peter Gerdes is a mathematician working in computability theory a.k.a. recursion theory, a branch of mathematical logic studying what computers (aka Turing machines) could in principle compute. Or more accurately when does being given access to the solution of one kind of problem (aka an oracle) allow the computer to solve some other problem. Currently focused on research about the alpha-REA degrees. He is also the maintainer of the rec-thy latex package designed to give a common set of basic commands for the working mathematician in computability theory. His History Peter received his Ph.D. f ..read more

Edward Hirsch is the President of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and has lead it since 2003. He just announced the appointment of 188 Guggenheim Fellowships to a distinguished and diverse group of culture-creators working across 52 disciplines. Chosen from a pool of almost 3,000 applicants, the Class of 2024 Guggenheim Fellows was tapped on the basis of prior career achievement and exceptional promise. As established in 1925 by founder Senator Simon Guggenheim, each fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible cond ..read more

Congrats to Avi Wigderson for his winning the 2023 Turing Award. It places Avi in with some of the great theorists of all time. See for other winners: Knuth, Rabin, Scott, Cook, Karp, Hopcroft, Tarjan, Hartmanis, Blum, Yao, Rivest, Shamir, Adleman, Valiant, Micali, Goldwasser, Aho, Ullman. Some Comments Avi was a student of mine back at Princeton in 1983. I do recall one interesting thing. Back in those days the P=NP? problem was relatively new, having been created by Cook in 1971. We had no idea how hard its resolution was going to be. I recall Avi saying to me: “I plan on working on P=NP fo ..read more

Last Tuesday, April 2nd, the New York Times had its weekly Science section. Its focus was all about the eclipse that happens on Monday, April 8th. When it will exactly happen? How best to watch it? How to enjoy even if you are blind—can you still enjoy it? And more. One how-to article they’ve had up online for longer is this. The Eclipse The main issue with the eclipse is, when is it safe to watch it? It is not safe unless one watches it with some important restrictions. Direct viewing of the sun without using any sort of protection can cause permanent eye damage. The intense light from the ..read more

With some connections to my chess research Modified from source Daniel Kahneman passed away last week. He won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics, shared with Vernon Smith, and was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013. Today I review some of his work on human decision making and how my chess niche may reflect it. Kahneman is best introduced by two popular books: his own Thinking, Fast and Slow in 2011 and The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis in 2016. Both books pay copious homage to his longtime research partner Amos Tversky, whom we mentioned with reference to chess here an ..read more

Some theorems lose validity after quantum processing Quantum Tarot source Dr. Lofa Polir is a research associate at UCLQ. This is the new University College London Quantum Institute. We have previously noted her move to England after working at the LIGO lab in Shreveport, Louisiana. Today we describe her recent disturbing discovery—or rather, “undiscovery.” It began with an unsettling experience last Wednesday after an exciting all-day lab session that re-created Alain Aspect’s Nobel Prize-winning experiment with heavy particles rather than photons. She is teaching an evening course ..read more

Including TheoryFest 2024 in a blended 5-day format Anupam Gupta just asked us to help announce the next 56th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2024). His own news is a recent move from CMU to NYU. This comes together with TheoryFest 2024 in an expanded 5-day format. The fun is at the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada from Monday, June 24 through Friday, June 28. The registration link is http://acm-stoc.org/stoc2024/registration.html In addition to the STOC 2024 paper talks, the program features keynote talks by Michal Feldman, Jakub Pachocki, an ..read more

For domain infringement and IP violations By GPT4 after conversation Neil L. was angry. I had expected him to be bored. Neil is a Leprechaun whose visits to Dick and me have been recounted in St. Patrick’s Day posts on this blog. Dick and Kathryn were on planes last night returning from Northern Michigan, so Neil had to come to me. The NCAA basketball tournament has not started yet. I’ve been lumbered with more high-profile chess cheating accusations besides those I began addressing in this post and have begun responding to here. So I was not eager to see green smoke at my living-roo ..read more

The present value of working on conjectures… Anil Nerode of Cornell University has served over sixty years—he’s believed to be the longest such faculty member in university history. He helped found Cornell’s computer science department, advised more than 55 doctoral students—a Department of Mathematics record—and made important contributions to logic, mathematics, computer science, and more. He and Juris Hartmanis jointly oversaw Ken’s Mathematical Sciences Institute postdoc at Cornell in 1986–89. I found it interesting that Anil has worked on teaching methods: “I was educated at Chicago und ..read more

My doctoral thesis advisor Geoffrey Grimmett source Dominic Welsh passed away last November 30th. He was my doctoral advisor 1981–86 at Merton College, Oxford University, and a giant in several fields of combinatorial and applied mathematics. Today I remember Dominic and describe his late-career influence on a modern problem: How “natural” is bounded-error quantum polynomial time? Among several memorials by colleagues and friends, there is now a detailed tribute on the Matroid Union blog by my fellow student and Oxford officemate Graham Farr with fellow students Dillon Mayhew and Jam ..read more