There is nothing wrong with "et al." especially after you mentioned the authors in full the first time. This is one my pet peeves blog.computationalco...
What's next, a page limit more than the number of atoms in the known universe?
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Ugh. The FOCS CFP suggests using citations as nouns: Authors are asked to avoid "et al." in citations in favor of an equal mention of all authors' surnames. If the number of authors is large, consider writing "\cite{XYZ} show..." instead of "X et al. show".
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Wow. Donald Knuth on Ai for math: www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/paper...
Today I learned that Savitch's theorem in the very first STOC is only a two-page paper. I had Claude convert it up in LaTeX, now three-pages.
Just because I'm in Oxford doesn't mean that I have to use its comma.
My short interview with Leah Hoffman for CACM
cacm.acm.org/opinion...
This is not an excuse, Gemini: "As an AI, I sometimes cross my wires, and in this case, I incorrectly attributed their result to a nonexistent 1999 paper of yours."
Puzzle me this (via Alex Bellos): Suppose the probability of a girl is 51% independently and uniformly over all children. In expectation, who has more sisters, a boy or a girl?
Oxford is one of the universities with a much nicer humanities building than computer science.
It seems ironic that Scientific American, the publication that declared "The Death of Proof" in 1993, now has at least three articles on the "First Proof" challenge.
Bill's asks ChatGPT to solve a math puzzle and only got partial answers. But he used the free model and waited three months to post the results.
Proof 2:
Pick k pairs of elements of A (possible since k<=n/2). There are 2^k ways to choose one element from each pair.
A similar proof shows that if k <= n/a then (n choose k) >= a^k.
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Proof 1: Let A be a set of size n.
Proof 1:
Let B be a subset of A of size k. Note A-B has at least k elements. For any subset C of B you can choose C and k-|C| elements from A-B, and there are 2^k possibilities for C.
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A cute not too hard problem: If k <= n/2 give a fully combinatorial proof that (n choose k) >= 2^k.
There's more than one way to do this.
Bill asks open problems as extra credit on class.
blog.computationalco...
Why not go all the way? Just hide an open problem in the regular problems and see what happens.
Joe Halpern passed away Friday at the age of 72. He was a leader in mathematically reasoning about knowledge.
www.linkedin.com/pos...
The list of accepted papers at #STOC2026 is out:
acm-stoc.org/stoc2026/acc...
Congratulations to all authors!
A young aspiring mathematicians asks about the future of math with all the AI advances. My advice: Embrace research but be ready to pivot as needed. We many be seeing a new age in mathematics, how could you not be part of it.
Mathematicians find largest prime number to date
www.der-postillon.co...
HT: Marco Lübbecke
Bill on the future historians access to our times. I'm more interested in how they will judge us, assuming there is a future with historians.
The new SIGACT Luca Trevisan Award for Expository Work promotes and recognizes high-impact work expositing ideas and results from the theory of computation. Nomination deadline is April 10th.
sigact.org/prizes/tr...
Google put out an article on accelerating research with Gemini. I'm one of the 34 authors for my adventures in vibe-coding a research paper.
Here's the correct link: blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2026/02/samp...
One of the humanities fellows at Oxford called a "computer science library" an oxymoron. Yet, the university has one and a visit helped bring new life to an old paper.
Thomas Watson has a new computational complexity textbook about to be published by Cambridge University Press. There's a free version online for personal use.
complexityincs.com
Bill talks about how technology leads to fears of less learning throughout history.
Large-language models have gotten very good at academic literature search, but it often requires two prompts where the second prompt is "You made up those references. Try again."
