Karp turned 90 in January of 2025. I searched to see if there is a 90th Birthday Conference for him. I did not find one (is there one?). For which years do we have celebratory birthday conferences?
Here are some conferences in honor of 60th Birthdays, by alphabetical order of last name.
Eric Allender here
Laci Babai here
Allan Borodin here
Stephen Cook here
Rod Downey here
Juris Hartmanis (at the 1988 Structures, now Complexity, conference, predating the web). Lance posted about it here.
Russell Impagliazzo here
Ravi Kanan here
Richard Karp (I could not find the link.)
Stuart Kurtz here
Michael Rabin (I could not find the link but I recall planning to go but snow cancelled my flight.)
Michael Saks here
Alexander Shen here
Michael Sipser here
Shang-Hua Teng here
Leslie Valiant here (I thought he also had an 80th bday but I am wrong- he is younger than 80.)
Vijay Vazarani here
Nikolay Vereschagin here
Avi Wigderson here
I am sure there are more.
Having a conference for someone's 80th birthday is also done. Here are a few:
Richard Stanley here
Michael Rabin here
Stephen Cook here (This was actually a conference for 50 years of Complexity Theory: A Celebration of the work of Stephen Cook. It was 50 years since Cook published what is now called the Cook-Levin Theorem. It also happened to be the year he turned 80.)
Donald Knuth here but also see Lance's blog post on the meeting here and Knuth's favorite bday here.
Martin Kruskal here and here for my post on it, and Clyde Kruskal (Martin's son) post on it. That was back in 2007 when I was a guest poster. And Clyde was my guest, so he was a guest-guest poster.
I am sure there are many more.
Numbers between 60 and 80 are rare (my wife read this and noted that there are 18 of them not including endpoints) but here are some:
John Osborne (UMCP Math Prof) had a 64th. Could not find a link.
Dick Dudley 65. (MIT Math professor, Not to be confused with Big Dick Dudley who was a wrestler or Underwood Dudley who wrote a book on Math Cranks, see here, which I was amazed to find out I DID NOT write a review of.
Mike Patterson here (Why 66? Why not 66!)
Harry Lewis had a 70th, see here (I asked WHY 70? He said the organizer, Margo Seltzer, wanted it then. That is another point- the organizer really controls which year and also if it happens at all.)
Mihalis Yannakakis had a 70th here
Ravi Kanan 70 here
Leonid Levin had a 75th, see here
Dick Lipton has a 75th, see here
Manuel Blum had a 77th since 77=7*11 is a Blum Integer. ( The only reason I know it exists is because Lance went to it.)
I've seen 100th bday conferences.
Turing here (This is one of many Turing Celebrations for his 100th. It was in 2012. Turing died in 1954.)
Erdos here (This was in 2012. Erdos died in 1996)
Chernoff here (He attended. He is still alive as of this writing, at the age of 101)
Kolmogorov here (The Day K turned 100 a student told me this. I then gave a lecture on Kolm complexity instead of the planned topic, on the fly. Now that my course is all on slides, and some classrooms don't even have a blackboard or whiteboard, I can't do that anymore. Oh well.)
I am sure there are more.
1) Why are 60, 80, 100 the usual numbers? They are nice and round. And 60 is big enough so that the person being celebrated has done stuff, but not so big that they are dead.
2) There should be more clever ones like Osborn (64) and Blum (77). If there was ever a conference in my honor that would be hard, since the number most associated to me is 5/12 (see here). I had not done much in math at the age of 5 months. Oh well.
