Computational Complexity

This will be one of a series of posts that I've always wanted to write but I needed to wait until I was no longer an academic administra...

(This post was inspired by  George Foreman , who passed away March 21, 2025, at the age of 76.) About 10 years ago I asked my class What is ...

I've heard this story from a few places. A father watches Back to the Future II with his kid. The 1989 movie view of 2015 looks entirel...

Tom Lehrer passed away on July 26, 2025, at the age of 97. I wrote a blog-obit  here . One of my readers read the post and went down a rabbi...

Last month the New York Times highlighted some AI generated short movies, including Total Pixel Space , by Jacob Adler that gets philosophi...

NICK: I read and enjoyed your blog post on Tom L (see  here ). I then spent 40 minutes down a rabbithole listening to his music on YouTube. ...

AI and Vacation I'm back from my German vacation. This was my first AI vacation, by which I mean how I used AI to navigate a foreign cou...

A guest post by Eric Allender prompted by an  (incorrect) P ≠ NP proof   recently published  in Springer Nature's Frontiers of Computer ...

Tom Lehrer passed away on Saturday July 26 at the age of 97. (For other obits see this collection of ten obits  here .) He worked in both of...

In a prior post I asked what criteria I used to place Prez and VP nominees since 1976 into two groups.  In the book  Abundance  I read that ...

A new prize: The Trevisan Prize, in honor of Luca Trevisan, who died in 2024 (blog obit is  here , open problems column in his honor is  her...

 I am curious how AI or humans can do on the following question. I have listed out the nominees for Prez and VP (Vice Prez) since 1976 and p...

Douglas Hofstadter first published  Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid  in 1979 and my then high school self tried, and failed, to...

UMCP has a building named  The Francis Scott Key Building STUDENT: How much money did Francis Scott Key give to have a building named after ...

I had an epiphany reading an article in the Trenton Times when I lived in New Jersey at the turn of the century. The article interviewed com...

 We denote the busy beaver function by BB. BB(n) is the max time a Turing machine of size n takes to halt on the empty string. (A particular...

A  new dean has taken my place, and I have returned to the professoriate at Illinois Tech, ending thirteen years in administration, six as ...

(I wrote this post a while back so its no longer NEW. More important--- if there has been a follow-up to the story that is not in my post, l...

Alberto Fraile and Daniel Fernández guest post on random walks generated by the distribution of prime numbers. In our recent papers, we expl...

The Univ of  MD at College Park holds a HS Math Competition every year. At the reception for the winners Professor Larry Washington points t...