A November to Remember

The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing opens in the US on November 28. If you read this blog you should see that movie. If one challenged British scientist biograph is not enough for you, The Theory of Everything with Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking opened earlier this month. Also this month has the physics-laden Interstellar and the nerd-hero robot adventure Big Hero 6. Science rules the box office, though likely to be clobbered by a Mockingjay.

Speaking of Turing, The ACM Turing Award will now come with a $1 million dollar prize, up from $250K, now on par with the Nobel Prize. Thanks Google.

Madhu Sudan will receive the 2014 Infosys Prize in Mathematics. Nimrod Megiddo wins the 2014 John von Neumann Theory Prize.

Harvard Computer Science gets 12 endowed faculty lines from former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. That's about the number of former Microsoft Research theorists now on the job market. Just saying,

Sanjeev Arora asks for comments on the potential changes to STOC/FOCS discussed at the recent FOCS. Boaz Barak has set up a new CS Theory jobs site. On that note, the November CRA News has 75 pages of faculty job ads, up from 50 a year ago.

Terry Tao talked twin, cousin and sexy primes on Colbert last week. The new result he quoted is that the Generalized Elliott-Halberstam conjecture implies that there are infinitely many pairs of primes at most six apart.

Not all happy news as we lost the great mathematician Alexander Grothendieck. Tributes by Luca and Ken.