We would have liked to organize Luca’s 60th birthday conference, but as you all know, we tragically lost him to a battle with cancer. However, we would like to take the occasion of Luca’s birthday today to celebrate his legacy and his impact on all of us, through a collection of talk videos available here: … Continue reading LucaFest (guest post by Anindya De, Pravesh Kothari, and Madhur Tulsiani)

https://tc.computer.org/tcmf/2024/05/28/focs-test-of-time-award-call-for-nominations-2024/

The theoretical computer science community and science at large suffered a great tragedy today. Luca Trevisan has been one of my intellectual and personal heroes since I joined the field. His work on pseudorandomness, complexity, cryptography and algorithms has been a strong influence on my work. Whenever I wanted to understand a new topic, often … Continue reading Luca Trevisan (1971-2024)

Ray Fulkerson was born on August 14, 1924, and so would have turned 100 this August. There will be two events to celebrate this, in Waterloo (July 17-19) and Cornell. (September 20-21), see below. Fulkerson 100: A Workshop in Celebration of Ray Fulkerson's 100th birthday July 17-19, 2024, Waterloo, CANADA https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~fulkerso/index.html The School of Operations Research … Continue reading Fulkerson centennial workshops

Avi Wigderson has won the Turing award. I just can't find the words on how happy this makes me, so won't even try to write a post, beyond what I wrote on Twitter. Many have posted on Avi's contributions, see Quanta, New Scientist, Scott's blog, Lance's blog, but to me, perhaps this tweet of Michal … Continue reading Avi wins the Turing, TCS for all

STOC/TheoryFest 2024 is in Vancouver, British Columbia this year, during the week of June 24-28. The registration website is now open at 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, and Tim Roughgarden, and workshops on Algorithmic Problems in Modern LLMs, Extremal Combinatorics, Length-Constrained Expanders, Online … Continue reading STOC/Theory fest 2024

I wrote this letter earlier today to the Harvard Corporation. I did not intend to make it public but was asked by some people to do so. I figured there is no harm in that. Many people that I respect are deeply disappointed at Harvard in particular and U.S. Universities at large, and are calling … Continue reading Letter to the Harvard Corporation re Harvard president

[Oct 27, 2023: I was hoping for this piece to be posted as an op-ed in the Crimson, since I really want to reach students that are well-intentioned but may not realize they are harmful. However, it was rejected and so I am posting this here]. [Update Jan 3, 2024: In light of my new … Continue reading Harvard, we have a problem

[Guest post by Shafi Goldwasser, See also PDF version of document] On the morning of Saturday, October 7, 2023, Hamas launched an attack near the Israel/Gaza border. In villages and towns near the border they went from door-to-door annihilating whole families. They killed children in front of their parents and siblings. They abused women. In … Continue reading Petition by CS & Math Laureates: Freedom for kidnapped children

October 12, 2023 To President Claudine Gay and the Harvard University leadership We attach an open letter for your consideration written on October 8, 2023 and signed by more than 350 faculty members at Harvard. The drafters of the letter (listed below) welcome President Gay’s statement unequivocally condemning Hamas’s terrorism and distancing the university from … Continue reading Open letter to the Harvard community