[This is a guest blog post on behalf of MSR, communicated to me by Yuval Peres. Like everyone who knew Michael, I was incredibly shocked and saddened by the news. I had relatively few interactions with Michael, but he has made a deep impression. I was always hoping we'd get a chance to collaborate , … Continue reading Michael Cohen

This year Harvard's Center for Mathematical Sciences and Applications is running a special year on combinatorics and complexity. We have many long-term visitors and postdocs, and several events that theoretical computer scientists might wish to take part in, including four workshops: Additive Combinatorics (10/2/2017-10/6/2017); Algebraic Methods in Combinatorics (11/13/2017 -11/17/2017); Probabilistic Methods in Combinatorics (2/5/2018-2/9/2018); and Coding and Information … Continue reading Special year on combinatorics and complexity

Fall is coming, and with it the annual holiday of FOCS. FOCS 2017 will be held at Berkeley from Oct 15-17, with a day of workshops/tutorials on Oct 14th. Registrations are now open at http://focs17.simons.berkeley.edu/registration.html Early registration deadline for the conference is Sept 25th, 2017. Speaking of workshops, there is one way to guarantee that … Continue reading FOCS 2017: Registration and call for workshops

One of the mysteries of computation is that, as far as we can tell, the time complexity of many natural computational problems is either $latex poly(n)$ (with a small exponent, such as $latex 1,2$ or $latex 3$) or at least $latex 2^{\Omega(n)}$ (with a not too small coefficient in the exponent). This is perhaps the … Continue reading The intermediate complexity conjecture

TL;DR: New notes on introduction to theoretical computer science are available at http://www.introtcs.org. This fall I will be teaching CS 121 at Harvard: Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science. This type of "intro theory" course is taught at many universities, sometimes under the name "introduction to the theory of computation" or "computability and automata", typically using … Continue reading Rethinking the “Intro Theory” course

(Guest post by Sanjeev Arora on behalf of the TheoryFest 2017 organizing committee) Having entered into the organization of TheoryFest 2017 with some trepidation, we organizers were very relieved to see feedback such as  “Best. STOC. Ever”. This post shares with you the feedback we got from attendees, and our plans for the next couple … Continue reading TheoryFest 2017: Organizers’ take (guest post)

The ITCS 2018 Call For Papers is now available!   ITCS is a conference that stands apart from all others. For a decade now, it has been celebrating the vibrancy and unity of our field of Theoretical Computer Science. See this blog post for a detailed discussion of what makes ITCS so cool and the brief description of ITCS’17 … Continue reading ITCS 2018 (guest post by Anna Karlin)

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!) … Continue reading TheoryFest + wutorial updates

I arrived to Montreal tonight and already marked the talks I want to attend on the STOC mobile app. I am looking forward to a great program. I am already seeing several times that I would like to attend two or three of the talks that occur in parallel. One day where this would definitely … Continue reading TheoryFest begins