Kolmogorov Centennial

Andrei Kolmogorov was born exactly hundred years ago last Friday the 25th. Kolmogorov made major contributions to "every mathematical area except number theory" as many a Russian have put it. He has directly affected my research through his algorithmic study of randomness, an area we now call Kolmogorov complexity.

To celebrate the centennial, I'm back in Dagstuhl for a workshop on Kolmogorov complexity after a brief stop in Heidelberg. Most of the best researchers in the area are here including many Russians. It should be an exciting week all around and during the week I will post some of the interesting work that I hear about.

For a background on Kolmogorov complexity, here are some lecture notes from a short course I gave. For an in-depth study, I cannot recommend enough the Kolmogorov Complexity book of Li and Vitanyi.