As we know, the last few days, have been tough times for certain groups of students at our universities. The groups have rioted, were then arrested by police, and then been handcuffed and led away to jail. Mass arrests among students are quite special since such events are extremely rare. Examples of a such events happen in 1968—over 56 years ago. This was the so called Vietnam War riots that were famous when students demonstrated against the it. 2024 The riots today at some of our best places for education have been compared to those from previous times—such as the 1968 ones for example. See ..read more

Alice says “How long is forever?” “Sometimes just one second.” Replies the White Rabbit Tuesday is a special day for the New York Times—since it always contains the Science Section. This section is current exciting articles on science. We wonder if Alice would find it fun to read—I always love to read it. I hope you do too. David Corcoran was the editor of Science Times and you can read his book on some of the top articles from it here. Science—A Problem A sample of an article that you can find in the Science Section is here: Generative A.I. Arrives in the Gene Editing World of CRISPR. By ..read more

Richard Feynman and Gian-Carlo Rota worked on different parts of science during their separate careers. Feynman of course was one of the most important scientists of the 20th century—see here. His work in theoretical physics radically reshaped our understanding of the universe we live in at the most fundamental subatomic levels. But Feynman’s brilliance was not solely due to his natural cognitive abilities. He relied on a method: a simple technique for seeing the world through the lens of open-ended questions, which he called his “favorite problems.” Rota worked in the subject of combinatorics ..read more

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