David Johnson forwards a note from the SODA Steering Committee about the possibility of having SODA outside the US. Summary: it can be done, with the kind of bid information that accompanies bids to other conferences with independent local arrangement....

Neal Stephenson is (or should be !) a familiar figure in the sci-fi/speculative fiction landscape: his Cryptonomicon is a retelling of the story of Turing, along with much modern day drama involving advanced crypto and security. His new book, Anathem,...

Via Anand Kulkarni (aka polybot) comes an interesting article in the WSJ by Masha Gessen on Grigori Perelman, Soviet-era mathematics and the question of 'big math'. The premise of the article (Masha Gessen has a book out on Perelman and the Poincare...

As the polylogblogdogslogglog blog points out, the ICS results are out. 39 papers were accepted in all - at some point I knew the number of submissions, but I've forgotten since. The ICS folks didn't make life easy for themselves by explicitly stating...

Jeff's post on his computational topology class (and the wonderful class outline), prompted me to write about something that I've tried to explain to people before. Computational topology is arguably the hottest thing in SoCG-land right now, and has...