Rock and TCS

Janos Simon and Luca Trevisan are reporting from FOCS 2006 (Berkeley, CA)---a conference from which our community is, alas, conspicuously absent---on the Complexity Blog and on In Theory, respectively. Their live reports make for very interesting reading. I encourage you to read Janos's report on the FOCS Business Meeting to get an idea of the state of funding for TCS in the US.

One of the events at FOCS was a concert by Lady X and The Positive Eigenvalues, a band that includes Christos Papadimitriou on keyboards. As Luca Trevisan notes in his blog, apart from Christos Papadimitriou, Mike Jordan, and guest star Anna Karlin, that band includes "a number of other Berkeleites (for some reason, all Italians)."

This is not the first ever example of a rock concert held at a major theory conference. I recall that Dexter Kozen and his band performed at the Monterey aquarium during LICS 1989. Amongst others, they offered (T)CS renditions of songs by the Ramones (I wanna be promoted) and the Dead Kennedys (Categories über alles). At the time I collected a leaflet with the text of the songs Dexter's band played, but I lost it. Here is a scanned version of the leaflet, courtesy of Don Sannella. Enjoy it!