We mean: Happy 10-Year Anniversary of the Complexity Blog src Lance Fortnow is famous for many things, but one is his blog Computational Complexity, which he created exactly ten years ago today. It endured a brief hiatus in early 2007, but has come back stronger than ever with the partnership of Bill Gasarch. It has [...]...

Four friends are partners in a game theory consultancy. One day a big company makes an offer to buy them out for $100 million. This is great news and everyone in the company is on board. The only hitch is that each wants to be compensated fairly from the deal. The four friends have shares [...]...

About once a week someone will tell me there is a bug in my forecast package for R because it gives forecasts that are the same for all future horizons. To save answering the same question repeatedly, here is my response. A point forecast is (usually) the mean of the distribution of a future observation in the time series, conditional on the past observations of the time series. It is possible, ev...

There are several algorithms developed to manually calculate the square root of a number. My favorite is the method of averaging, which is probably the least complicated.  In this method, the number is divided by the nearest square root estimate, … Continue reading →...

Here’s an interesting bit of history from Julian Havil’s new book The Irrationals. In 1593 Francois Vièta discovered the following infinite product for pi:Havil says this is “the earliest known.” I don’t know whether this is specifically the oldest product representation for pi, or more generally the oldest formula for an infinite sequence of approximations [...]...

Mathematicians at UC Davis have come up with a new way to crinkle up the fabric of space-time -- at least in theory....

I was thrilled to read that a New Jersey high school principal discussed game theory with the graduating class of 2012. Principal Sears gave a fantastic speech about thinking about how to play for the long run. His entire 4-minute speech is included below. Video from Summit Patch (If the video does not load, you [...]...

This weekend I ran across a blog post by Federico Pereiro entitled Read the masters. The post opens with a quote from Niels Henrik Abel:When asked how he developed his mathematical abilities so rapidly, he replied “by studying the masters, not their pupils.”Someone asked me via Twitter what I thought of this, and my reply [...]...

Let’s play a game. I will first roll a standard die. I will then toss a pair of fair coins as many times as the die indicates. If the pair of coins show two heads in any of the tosses, then I win the game. Otherwise, you win the game. What are the chances that [...]...

Hitting hardness makes a 30-year-old conjecture harder Alan Selman is one of the founders of Complexity Theory, both through his deep research and his unselfish service. We will discuss his research in a moment, but his service has helped shape the field. He was one of the founders in 1986 of the Structure in Complexity [...]...