Saturday, September 27, 2014

MikeFest


I rarely highlight individual events on the blog, but one's advisor only turns sixty once. We will honor Michael Sipser at MIT on Sunday, October 26 with a one-day symposium full of great speakers in complexity. As one of Sipser's PhD students, I'm helping to organize the event and serving as emcee for the dinner speeches. Please send me any funny or embarrassing stories or pictures of Sipser through the decades.

Many of you know Sipser from his popular textbook Introduction to the Theory of Computation. Sipser was one of the driving forces in complexity in the 70's and 80's. Sipser initiated the program of using circuit complexity to separate complexity classes and, with Merrick Furst and James Saxe, showed parity could not be computed by poly-size constant-depth circuits. His research includes how to simulate randomness by alternation, was the first to explore hardness vs randomness, made great advances in the complexity of interactive proofs, and much more. Sipser led the MIT Mathematics department for the last ten years and was recently appointed Dean of Science.

Join us in Cambridge for this great day to celebrate an extraordinary man.

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P.S. STOC call posted, Deadline November 4
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1 comment:

  1. Anonymous12:02 PM, September 30, 2014

    Thank you for organizing this program. Considering the sheer creativity and diversity of the work, Michael Sipser has no peers. Just about every major progress in Complexity Theory since mid seventies can be traced back to Michael Sipser, directly or indirectly. The three well-known ones are mentioned in the conference poster: circuit complexity, pseudorandomness, and interactive proofs.

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