Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Greg Bodwin @gbodwin.bsky.social · 9d

Some UMich TCS lore: a (now-retired) professor once photoshopped these shocked Hilberts to express his surprise at increasingly complicated Hilbert's Hotel situations. They are now in use as all-purpose math reactions. Please enjoy

2

Reposted by Greg Bodwin

Hung Le @hunglv.bsky.social · Aug 25

Some questions on spanners in my talk at the Simons Institute. Since the talk, progress has been made on a few questions, but most are open. minorfree.github.io/SpannerQues/

Some Questions on Spanners | Rambling on Graphs

minorfree.github.io

2 2 6

Greg Bodwin @gbodwin.bsky.social · Jul 1

adding a "Do you like this personality 👍👎" box to my email signature

4

Greg Bodwin @gbodwin.bsky.social · Jun 4

but what name could possibly be cooler or more metal than Chris Peikert's Theorem

1

Greg Bodwin @gbodwin.bsky.social · Jun 4

Thinking about how the security people give their results metal names like "spectre" and "meltdown" and design cool logos for them. We should give that treatment to our theorems

3 1 9

Greg Bodwin @gbodwin.bsky.social · Jun 2

I too use Clément to write all my papers

1 5

Reposted by Greg Bodwin

Michael Dinitz @mdinitz.bsky.social · May 31

Incredibly well deserved!!

Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · May 31

Huge congratulations to Tracy Kimbrel, who received the 2025 ACM SIGACT Service Award 🏆 for his time, dedication, and advocacy as Program Director for the Algorithmic Foundations (AF) program at the NSF!
sigact.org/prizes/servi... #TCSSky

2025 ACM-SIGACT Distinguished Service Award

sigact.org

2 6

Greg Bodwin @gbodwin.bsky.social · May 25

Hot CS take: Big-O notation should have been defined to hide constant factor changes in the input variable, not the output function value

1 3

Greg Bodwin @gbodwin.bsky.social · May 13

when we gonna stop with these human-written proofs, we were gifted with bots

Greg Bodwin @gbodwin.bsky.social · May 13

Lean with it Coq with it

1 3

Reposted by Greg Bodwin

𝖬𝖺𝗁𝖽𝗂 𝖢𝗁𝖾𝗋𝖺𝗀𝗁𝖼𝗁𝗂 @mahdi.ch · Apr 4

Huge congratulations to my amazing student Yeyuan Chen (+co-author Zihan Zhang of OSU advised by Zeyu Guo) for being awarded the STOC 2025 Best Student Paper Award! Their monumental result proves that explicit Reed-Solomon codes can correct more errors than previously known:
arxiv.org/abs/2408.15925

Explicit Folded Reed-Solomon and Multiplicity Codes Achieve Relaxed Generalized Singleton Bounds

In this paper, we prove that explicit FRS codes and multiplicity codes achieve relaxed generalized Singleton bounds for list size $L\ge1.$ Specifically, we show the following: (1) FRS code of length $...

arxiv.org

2 7 49

Greg Bodwin @gbodwin.bsky.social · Mar 14

Thanks, good nuance. Lately I've been thinking about how I write papers assuming that the reader is going sequentially ("I don't need to re-explain this nuance - I just talked about it a page ago") but I almost never read this way. I think I have room for improvement here.

1

Reposted by Greg Bodwin

Chris Peikert @chrispeikert.bsky.social · Mar 14

I find that this works, mostly, but requires the right amount of skepticism.

Too much leads me to the “dual” of “fully trustful” reading, bogged down in doubting every little piece of ink, and not seeing the shapes or overall picture.

Greg Bodwin @gbodwin.bsky.social · Feb 6

A proof is a logical argument written to convince a skeptical audience. A corollary is that the best way to read a proof is to roleplay as a skeptical audience.

1 3 9

Greg Bodwin @gbodwin.bsky.social · Mar 4

when my family asks me about the impact of my research

1 13 50

Greg Bodwin @gbodwin.bsky.social · Feb 23

frantically changing "graph theory" to "autonomous killer graph theory" in all my papers

Chris Paxton @cpaxton.bsky.social · Feb 22

Amazing

1 2 20

Reposted by Greg Bodwin

Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · Feb 21

This is terrible news, and part of the ongoing assault on science in the U.S. by the new administration.

To honor Tracy Kimbrel and his service to the NSF's AF division, here's a short thread about a beautiful algorithm of his, joint with Rakesh Sinha (www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...). 1/

1 6 11

Greg Bodwin @gbodwin.bsky.social · Feb 6

I didn't mean me, of course. Everything I say is brilliant and beyond reproach.

4

Greg Bodwin @gbodwin.bsky.social · Feb 6

A good sign for this adversarial reading is if you find yourself reading the paper in a non-linear order. A trustful reading usually proceeds line-by-line, but in a skeptical reading you constantly skip around to the part that you currently find most suspicious.

4

Greg Bodwin @gbodwin.bsky.social · Feb 6

The alternative is to read with the view that the results could not possibly be correct, and the authors (those fools) could not possibly have proved it, and you will find the inevitable flaw. And then as you read you're slowly, begrudgingly, forced to admit that they were right after all.

1 1 8

Greg Bodwin @gbodwin.bsky.social · Feb 6

In particular, trustful reading leads to the sense that you can verify each individual step of the proof, but you have no idea of the bigger picture, how you might have come up with it yourself, or how to extend the argument.

1 2

Greg Bodwin @gbodwin.bsky.social · Feb 6

I think a common newcomer mistake is to read papers automatically trusting all the claims made by the authors, because the authors are smart and the paper was published and so the claims are probably correct. The claims *are* probably correct, but you should set this aside as a reader.

1 2

Greg Bodwin @gbodwin.bsky.social · Feb 6

A proof is a logical argument written to convince a skeptical audience. A corollary is that the best way to read a proof is to roleplay as a skeptical audience.

2 2 10

Greg Bodwin @gbodwin.bsky.social · Feb 3

Same

1

Greg Bodwin @gbodwin.bsky.social · Jan 16

Guy who updates his beliefs towards frequentism after witnessing examples of it working

1 4

Reposted by Greg Bodwin

Maren @paarsec.com · Jan 16

One of my favourite things anyone has ever said about art. You'll be missed, David. 🌹

“Right here people might bring up Vincent van Gogh as an example of a painter who did great work in spite of—or because of—his suffering. I like to think that van Gogh would have been even more prolific and even greater if he wasn’t so restricted by the things tormenting him. I don’t think it was pain that made him so great—I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.” ― David Lynch

24 3.6K 11K