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...

Spread the word: there is a new prize in Theoretical Computer Science in honor of Luca Trevisan--

cs.unibocconi.eu/call-nominat...

(Intent-to-nominate letters due by July 31.)

The 2025 Gödel Prize is given to Eshan Chattopadhyay and David Zuckerman, “Explicit two-source extractors and resilient functions”.

Paper: doi.org/10.4007/anna...

Favorite Theorems Blog Post: blog.computationalco...

NSF Physics was cut by 85%, basically wiping out most of its capacity for supporting research.

NSF Astronomy was cut by 53%

Undergrad education was cut by 71% and research on learning by 79%

Graduate education was cut by 100% to ZERO.

#GiftLink ⚛️🔭

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Bill loses his REU grant so he goes on an REU rant.

blog.computationalco...

This statement from the NSF is insane.

Science is, in essence, designed to separate the true from the false.

Understanding how falsehoods spread is key to the scientific endeavor. It is not a violation of free speech to be proven wrong.

To be clear, one of my major grants is among the 75 stop work orders sent to Cornell yesterday. This means that, as of yesterday, we are not allowed to spend on this grant. The grant funds the work of several graduate students, all of whom are extremely dedicated & doing outstanding research

While serving on PCAST we interacted with this group. They did great work providing efficient digital services to the federal government and cited them as an excellent model for other potential service needs such as science communication: bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/pcast/briefi...

A letter of support for the NIH funding of biomedical research, and the damage wrought by imposing severe caps on indirect costs: docs.google.com/forms/d/1Agz...

NSF is now asking all grantees to cease "all non-compliant grant and award activities" which "...may include... grant activity that uses or promotes the use of DEIA principles and frameworks."

Anyone want to chime in on the legality?

Full statement (and future updates):
new.nsf.gov/executive-or...

Cynthia Dwork and Ingrid Daubechies among the recipients of the National Medal of Science.

www.whitehouse.gov/b...

Tommaso d'Orsi, Chris Jones, Jake Ruotolo, Salil Vadhan, Jiyu Zhang
Sparsest cut and eigenvalue multiplicities on low degree Abelian Cayley graphs
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17115

Found slides by Ankur Moitra (presented at a TCS For All event) on "How to do theoretical research." Full of great advice!

My favourite: "Find the easiest problem you can't solve. The more embarrassing, the better!"

Slides: drive.google.com/file/d/15VaT...
TCS For all: sigact.org/tcsforall/

Hello Bluesky! (and bye-bye Twitter).

I just wrote a blog post about a bump in the road along the way to teaching a computer a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.

xenaproject.wordpress.com/2024/12/11/f...

There have been several remarkable developments in combinatorics, my field of mathematics. A few weeks ago I gave a talk to a general mathematical audience in which I described six breakthroughs from the last five years.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=726O...

I made a starter pack for Theoretical Computer Science (broadly construed)!

#TheoryCS #TCSSky #MathSky #AcademicSky 🧪

go.bsky.app/2jS2SGw