The Dagstuhl Family

This week I'm at the Dagstuhl workshop on Computational Complexity of Discrete Problems. As you long time readers know Dagstuhl is a German center that hosts weekly computer science workshops. I've been coming to Dagstuhl for some 25 years now but for the first time brought my family, my wife Marcy and daughter Molly, so they can see where I have spent more than half a year total of my life. Molly, currently a freshman at the University of Chicago, was the only Chicago representative, though the attendees included four Chicago PhDs, a former postdoc and a former professor.

We had a different ice breaker, where each person wrote topics they think about which ended up looking look like an interesting bipartite graph.

Molly has a few thoughts on Dagstuhl:

The coolest thing about the study of computer science is this place.

Okay, I know my dad would disagree with me (he probably thinks the coolest thing about computer science is the computer science itself). But for me, someone quite removed from the math and science and thinking, this place is by far the coolest thing about the computer science community. The point of it is isolation, as well simultaneous connection. The isolation comes in the form of a meeting center in rural Germany, separated from the world, devices which can (and do) block wifi in rooms like lecture rooms and the dining hall, resulting in a week without much interaction with the outside world. The connection stems from this very isolation -- in this highly isolated place, people are forced to connect with each other face-to-face, and to get to know each other, as well as the ideas and problems people are working on. The isolation creates a heightened sense of community, both in social and intellectual senses of the word. Forced to be so close and so interconnected, it’s no wonder so many problems get solved here.

I’m glad I got to come see why my father has been coming here for a quarter century. He is very old.