Some researchers are greater than the sum of their publications. In addition to their publications, some researchers are puzzle freaks, some are distillers who can explain others' results even better, clearer, and yet others are bloggers. I was reminded of this "greater than the sum" phenomenon when I was in CA past Wednesday and spoke with D. Sivakumar. Siva showed a great knack for abstracting gr...

A Norah Jones-esque friend (no, never heard my friend sing, just her smile and personality) told me Assaf Naor won an award and it will be presented by the Dutch Royalty. So, I browsed around and here it is: our own Assaf Naor wins the European Mathematical Society prize (he is in great company too). The EMS Citation states that "Naor is the leading architect of the modern theory of non-linear func...

I was browsing, compiling potential travel dates and noticed: Sigcomm in Seattle overlaps Dagstuhl workshop on Sublinear Algorithms, and KDD in Las Vegas overlaps with VLDB in New Zealand. I am reminded of the mathematician (resp engineer) who liked having a wife and a mistress so he could tell each he was with the other, and spend time in his office working on puzzles (resp. coding).I was browsing...

An event to celebrate Mike Paterson's contributions, Mike66, will be held at Warwick, Sept 18--19, organized by Artur Czumaj, Leslie Goldberg and Uri Zwick. Some of my best memories are from the year I spent at Warwick, and the afternoons I would hang out with Mike, solving puzzles, and other times in his office, trying to sneak a peek at his notes from 70's, whenever possible. He means many things...

I love math/algorithmic puzzles, and when I was in high school, worked on olympiad problems for fun (I did write a "book" on solving these problems and sold them locally thereby funding a year of my social life in college, but no more on that story here). Yesterday, on my way to my vacation in Croatia, I decided to read Peter Winkler's book (Mathematical Puzzles: A connoisseur's collection). Peter...