Two Santa Fe Institute researchers were recently featured in Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP, a prominent computation blog.
In a post on International Women’s Day, bloggers RJ Lipton and KW Regan highlight External Professor Dana Randall’s work at the boundary between math and physics, and its ties to complexity theory in a post entitled Advancing and Counting.
Randall seeks to understand random processes connected to physical systems and, as the bloggers point out, we often have no control over random processes — which tends to make exploring their behavior more difficult. In the post, they highlight a computer algorithm for randomly shuffling a deck of cards, and the use of a random process for sampling a large, complex system.
Randall is an ADVANCE professor of computing, director of the Algorithms and Randomness Center, and an adjunct professor of mathematics at Georgia Tech. ADVANCE is a Georgia Tech program to develop systemic and institutional approaches that increase representation, full participation, and advancement of women and minorities within academic STEM careers.
Read the post, "Advancing and Counting," on Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP (March 8, 2021)
In an earlier post entitled New, Old, Ancient Results, Lipton and Regan also discussed former Omidyar Fellow Joshua Grochow’s expository work on classic problems in computation.
They highlight a 2016 paper Grochow wrote on applications of the polynomial method which, Grochow writes, “was motivated by deep questions about structure in the prime numbers, the geometry of lattice points, and the design of statistical experiments.”
Grochow spent 2014-2017 at SFI as a Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow and is now an assistant professor of computer science and mathematics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He’s known for his work with geometric complexity theory.
Read the post, "New, Old, Ancient Results," on Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP (February 27, 2021)