Suppose you're an undergraduate hoping to go into academic research, or a beginning grad student. It could be very helpful to have academic contacts at other schools---such as professors, but a...
http://andysresearch.blogspot.com/2014/10/making-academic-contacts-some-thoughts.html
INTRODUCTION After a night of board games, I found myself thinking about the peculiarities of movement on discrete versions of the plane. This suggested a number of questions. As they would lik...
http://andysresearch.blogspot.com/2011/09/geometric-graphs-offering.html
Below is a simple-to-state open question, stemming from this paper of mine from CCC'09. First, I'll state the question; then I'll give some background, explaining how it's an instance of a more ...
http://andysresearch.blogspot.com/2011/06/joint-computational-complexity-and-buy_15.html
Today I'd like to put out an appeal to readers. If you have a solid grasp of English and an interest in circuit complexity (no expertise required!), please consider helping proofread the forthco...
http://andysresearch.blogspot.com/2011/05/exciting-new-textbook-and-request.html
Following offline conversations and recent discussions on other blogs (hat-tip to Anna and David ), I want to promote the Geek Feminism Blog initiative asking computing conferences to adopt expl...
http://andysresearch.blogspot.com/2010/12/harassment-policies-for-theory_09.html
Anyone interested in computational complexity should be aware of ECCC , the most important and widely-used online repository for complexity papers. (Depending on your specific interests, various ...
http://andysresearch.blogspot.com/2010/11/eccc-what-authors-should-know.html
From a paper of MIT's Bjorn Poonen , I learned of an amazingly simple open problem. I'll just quote the paper (here Q denotes the rational numbers): "Harvey Friedman asked whether there exists ...
http://andysresearch.blogspot.com/2010/07/injective-polynomials.html
I just learned about a result of Kolmogorov from the '50s that ought to interest TCS fans. Consider circuits operating on real-variable inputs, built from the following gates: -sum gates, of unb...
http://andysresearch.blogspot.com/2009/08/wit-and-wisdom-from-kolmogorov_10.html
Given a subset A of the integers mod N, we can ask, how many 4-element `patterns' appear in A? A pattern is an equivalence class of size-4 subsets of A, where two 4-sets S, S' are considered the ...
http://andysresearch.blogspot.com/2009/05/additive-combinatorics-request-for_20.html
A number is called algebraic if it is the root of a nonzero polynomial with integral coefficients (or, equivalently, rational coefficients); otherwise it is transcendental. Item: there exists a...
http://andysresearch.blogspot.com/2009/03/algebraic-and-transcendental.html
So I'm co-writing a survey paper for a course project, and struggling with the conflicting demands of completeness and brevity. As if charmed, while taking a break I happen upon a '99 paper calle...
http://andysresearch.blogspot.com/2008/12/rather-elegant-solution.html
Elections, sporting events, and other competitions can be exciting. But there is also a sense in which they are almost always dull, and this can be proved rigorously. Allow me to explain. (What ...
http://andysresearch.blogspot.com/2008/10/excitement-and-probability.html
If you are straight, would you join a club that disallowed gay people? Or keep your membership in a club that stopped admitting them? Would you feel distinguished by your membership? To the contr...
About a week ago, at great risk to my studies, I gave in to temptation and checked out 'Infinite Jest' from the library. Last night, ~300 pages into rereading this wonderful novel, I learned tha...
http://andysresearch.blogspot.com/2008/09/david-foster-wallace.html
Funny web comic touching on complexity theory. From Request Comics. Handed across the room by Madhu to Brendan, who showed it to me. Earlier I'd seen another, slightly more reverent, comics ...
It's called Theorem of the Day . I just found it, so I can't judge how accurate the frequency claim is, but Robin Whitty has stacked up an impressive collection of short, illustrated introduction...
http://andysresearch.blogspot.com/2008/05/must-see-site.html
This morning I was delighted to learn that Alan Baker, the Swarthmore professor whose Philosophy of Science class I took senior year, recently won the US Shogi championships--read his account her...
You should come to Johnny D's in Davis Square and hear No Static, a 9-or-10-piece Steely Dan tribute band (standard preemptive clarification: Steely Dan is the band name, not a person). No St...
http://andysresearch.blogspot.com/2008/05/free-on-friday.html
Today I want to describe and recommend a paper I quite enjoyed: The Computational Complexity of Universal Hashing by Mansour, Nisan, and Tiwari (henceforth MNT). I think that this paper, while n...
http://andysresearch.blogspot.com/2008/05/complexity-calisthenics-part-i.html
It's just this: Food is key. We need more food. (In what follows, I'm speaking not just for MIT theory students, but for all students everywhere.) Cancel the subscription to 'Journal of Timed Ne...
http://andysresearch.blogspot.com/2008/04/simple-plan-to-improve-your-graduate.html
Today I bumped into an order of growth I hadn't seen before, and thought I'd share it for a modest bit of mental aerobics. Readers may well have seen functions of form f(n) = (log n)^c, known...
http://andysresearch.blogspot.com/2008/04/some-babies-grow-in-peculiar-way.html
Time for a personal update: I'm enjoying myself greatly here in Cambridge, and was recently admitted as a transfer student to MIT's EECS department. The move has both personal and academic advant...
http://andysresearch.blogspot.com/2008/03/news-and-some-number-theory.html
Say you're trying to predict whether some event E occurs or not. There is another collection of events I_1, I_2, ... I_k, which are positive predictors of E: for every j, E occurs with probabilit...
http://andysresearch.blogspot.com/2008/03/beasts-of-probability-and-plane.html
I had some gift-giving duties to attend to today... halfway into the wrapping phase, my mind wandered in a predictable direction: Given a set of rectangular box dimensions, what is the smallest ...
1. Pick your favorite countable set S. Let F be a 'nested' family of distinct subsets of S; that is, if A, B are members of F, then either A is contained in B or B is contained in A. Then clearl...
http://andysresearch.blogspot.com/2007/12/cardinal-rules.html