And if you're faculty: I beg you, for the sake of everyone else in the world, strongly consider creating your own public webpages for your course instead of having everything locked up in Canvas.

Congratulations to Thomas Rothvoss and Lang Liu, the inaugural winners of the Trevisan Prize at Bocconi University.

cs.unibocconi.eu/trevisan-pri...

Here are FIVE surprising ways federal data make your life better, with our friends at @essentialdata.us:

1. We get up to $53B/yr free pest control because we don't accidentally build bridges through bat habitats

2. We know where to get those sweet, sweet space minerals

3. Labubu matcha

Teaser: #FOCS2025 will include a banquet dinner on Tuesday, December 16. Based on the view from the place, can you guess where?

A university and an academic publisher walk into a bar.

The publisher orders a pint, sells it back to the university, asks the barman to pay the bill.

I wrote an op-ed on the world-class STEM research ecosystem in the United States, and how this ecosystem is now under attack on multiple fronts by the current administration: newsletter.ofthebrave.org/p/im-an-awar...

Dave Patterson (UC Berkeley) points out why public investment in basic research and education is vital, and defunding it is incredibly short-sighted.

thehill.com/opinion/tech...

💡 For students, the yearly IEEE (or ACM) membership costs less than USD 20. And leads to a #FOCS2025 registration fee reduced by USD 80...

Applications for travel support, for students and postdocs, are open! ⏰ Deadline: Sep 19 #FOCS2025 #TCSSky

focs.computer.org/2025/travel-...

(no requirement to have a paper at the conference to apply)

My thoughts on the crucial importance of methodology on self-reported AI performance on mathematics competitions, and my policy on commenting on such reports going forward: mathstodon.xyz/@tao/1148814...

The dictionary has spoken.

'Vacations.'

The word is 'vacations.'

NEW: NSF will be kicked out of their building. Announcement will be made tomorrow by HUD Sec. and Governor of VA. HUD will take over the NSF building over the next two years.

NSF staffer: "There is no planning for NSF, no identified future location, appropriation for a new building or a move."

I am starting at NYU this Fall! Although it is inconveniently located, if you find yourself in New York, come say hi. Psyched to be part of such a stacked theory group!!

Some of you may be wondering about the omission of Richard Cole --- algorithmist extraordinaire --- from this list. It is with much admiration (and just as much regret) that I write that he is retiring after 43(!) years at NYU. No worries: we'll make sure he spends a big part of his time with us!

They join the current theorists: Boris Aronov, Marshall Ball, Aaron Bernstein, Nir Bitansky, Yevgeniy Dodis, Martin Farach-Colton, @gautamkamath.com, Lisa Hellerstein, Subhash Khot, Chris Musco, Oded @regevlab.bsky.social, and me. (And many other colleagues in closely related areas.)

And the next three: Sanjeev (who's making the move up the Northeast Corridor from Penn to NYC), Tony, and Juan. Again, broad and deep: algorithms (especially sublinear algos), quantum+complexity+crypto, and ML theory for prediction-making.

The post was not big enough for 6 photos (apparently the limit is 4), so here are the pics: Ainesh, Allen, Fermi, all three of them broad (numerical linear algebra and optimization, high-dimensional and robust statistics, and crypto resp.), and all three with recent exciting results in quantum!

It's a thrill to announce names of the amazing set of theory people joining NYU CS+CSE this year: @aineshbakshi.bsky.social, Allen Liu, @fermima.bsky.social, Sanjeev Khanna, Tony Metger, and Juan Perdomo.

@nyucourant.bsky.social
@nyutandon.bsky.social

This is great. I'm a systems person, but I had a grant through AitF a while back (with Michael Mitzenmacher) that produced some really solid results that I remain very proud of. It was great to have a program that was friendly to cross-area research.

Tracy Kimbrel, former National Science Foundation program director extraordinaire, will receive the 2025 ACM SIGACT Distinguished Service Award. He spearheaded programs such as TRIPODS (foundations of data science) and AitF (Algorithms in the Field).
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In 1965, Paula Harris would find algorithmic improvements that made LP solving 50% less expensive. She was a senior mathematician in the computing group at British Petroleum

Today, 60 years later, her former colleagues still speak in awe of her intelligence

📷 Sabastião Salgado
#Churchgateterminus
Bombay,India 1995

#Sebastiaõ Salgado