Call for nominations: Gödel Prize 2013

The Call for Nominations for the 2013 Gödel Prize has been posted (pdf). Nominations for the award should be submitted to the Chair of the Award Committee, Sanjeev Arora - goedelchair@gmail.com. The deadline for nominations is January 11, 2013.

Any research paper or series of papers by a single author or by a team of authors is deemed eligible if

• the paper was published in a recognized refereed journal no later than December 31, 2012;
• the main results were not published (in either preliminary or final form) in a journal or conference proceedings before January 1st, 2000.

The Award Committee consists of  Krzysztof R. Apt (CWI Amsterdam and University of Amsterdam), Sanjeev Arora, Chair (Princeton University), Josep Díaz (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya), Giuseppe Italiano (Università di Roma Tor Vergata), Daniel Spielman (Yale University), and Éva Tardos (Cornell University). On behalf of the TCS community, I thank the committee members for their important service.

Let me close with a message to the "volume B community". Perhaps the logic/semantics/programming languages community should think strategically, look at the most prominent journal papers meeting the eligibility requirements and drum up the strongest possible support for those. Feel free to look at your crystal ball and suggest candidates for nomination using comments to this post.

As the new president of the EATCS until ICALP 2014, I am taking a sabbatical from issuing nominations in order to avoid any possible conflict of interest.

John Cleese on creativity

Recently, I posted a link to a lecture on creativity in computer science by one of my PhD students. After having done so, I was struck by the thought that, at some point, I had watched an excellent, and very funny, lecture by John Cleese on creativity. Here it is, in case any of my readers wants to have a look.

Call for nominations: Presburger Award 2013

The call for nominations for the EATCS Presburger Award 2013 is out. The Presburger Award is given to a young scientist (in exceptional cases to several young scientists) for outstanding contributions in theoretical computer science, documented by a published paper or a series of published papers.

Scientists nominated for the award have to be at most 35 years old at the time of the deadline of nomination, which is the 31st of December 2012. This means that  the date of birth of researchers nominated for the Presburger Award 2013 should be in 1977 or later.

The award committee for 2013 consists of Monika Henzinger (chair), Antonin Kucera (who is one of the vice-presidents of the EATCS) and Peter Widmayer.

I hope that you will sharpen your pencils and nominate your favourite young TCS researcher for this award.

Call for nominations: EATCS Award 2013

The call for nominations for the EATCS Award 2013 is about to be published officially. However, you can already see it here.

I hope that you will consider submitting a nomination. There are many colleagues out there who would be worthy of this honour, but they can only receive the award if someone nominates them. (I know that this is a triviality, but sometimes people do not send in nominations for their favourite candidates and then wonder why they did not get the prize :-))

Expect more calls for nominations over the next few days.

Lecture on creativity by one of my PhD students

Last week, Eugen-Ioan Goriac, who is a third-year PhD student of mine, delivered a lecture on creativity as part of the Research Methodology course that I am running at Reykjavik University.

Eugen has made a video of his lecture available on YouTube. Here it is, in case it might be of interest to some of my readers.

Enjoy it!

The Feit-Thompson theorem checked in Coq!

The Feit-Thompson Theorem  is a key result in the theory of finite groups. Its original proof is 255 pages long and is perhaps the first example of a very long and highly complex proof in group theory.

At 5:46 p.m. on September 20, Georges Gonthier sent an email to his colleagues at the Microsoft Research-Inria Joint Centre in Paris announcing the completion of a six-year effort to prove the Feit-Thompson Theorem in the Coq proof assistant. The mail read, in full: “This is really the End.”

You can read more about this work here and here. 

Congratulations to Georges and his coworkers on this monumental achievement!