First a message from David Johnson for proposals on locations for SODA 2012 both in and outside the US. Here's an interesting approach to the birthday paradox using variances. Suppose we have m people who have birthdays spread uniformly over n days....

Last Friday DIMACS celebrated its 20th anniversary. Muthu summarizes the event. DIMACS has served the theoretical computer science community well over these two decades. They have hosted a number of postdocs and visitors usually around a Special Focus...

As most of you know there are 7 problems worth $1,000,000 (see here). It may be just 6 since Poincare's conjecture has probably been solved. Why are these problems worth that much money? There are other open problems that are worth far less...

A student asked me which version of a research paper to cite, a journal (the last reviewed version) or a conference (the first reviewed version) of a paper. I generally cite papers in this precedence list. The fully refereed journal version, even if it...

There are now bibles online where you can click for different versions, different translations, different interepretations, historical context, etc. The same is true, or will be soon, for other faith's holy books as well. Will there come a day when...