TheoryFest + wutorial updates

Tomorrow is the last day of TheoryFest. My sense is that it was very successful in the most important metric that it was a great event for the people that attended it.  However, we will know more about this once we send out a questionnaire to attendees next week. (Please respond when you get it!)

Many people helped in making TheoryFest happen (my own role was quite limited: chairing the short invited paper committee), but two people that I think are worth singling out are the general chairs Hamed Hatami and Pierre McKenzie. Doing local arrangements often means a lot of work dealing with hotels, food, registrations, etc., without much recognition, but they really did an amazing job.

I might attempt later some longer expositions of some of the talks, but in the meantime, see Suresh’s and Dick’s posts. Luca writes about the awards. The best student paper awardee, Pasin Manurangsi, gave a wonderful talk about his almost tight hardness of approximation result for the classical densest-k-subgraph problem.  He managed to explain clearly what the result is, what are the limits of what we can hope for, and convey the main ideas of the proof, all in a 20 minute talk. The proof itself is beautiful: the reduction (from 3SAT) is simple and natural, but the analysis is quite subtle, combining clever new ideas with classical results in combinatorics.

Tomorrow is the workshop day which I am also looking forward to. Tselil Schramm said that we should probably have called our SOS workshop a “wutorial” since, while we will cover some “hot off the presses” results,  we are planning to mostly make the talks an accessible introduction to the field. In particular, Pablo Parrilo’s talk will be a broad overview of the sum of squares algorithm’s history, applications, and connections to other areas. (See my previous post for description of all the talks.) That said, there are some other great workshops in parallel to ours. That is probably one of the biggest problems with TheoryFest – too much great content and too little time..