Thursday, June 22, 2017

TheoryFest Day 3: "I forgot to talk about Kant"

The above is an actual quote from Oded Goldreich in his hilarious speech accepting the Knuth Prize for 2017. This speech was highly anticipated, because most of us have spent years reading and marvelling at Oded's opinions (he addressed the elephant in the room very promptly)

As the title suggests, there was a heavy dose of philosophy, with quotes from Kant, Weber, Frankl, and MacIntyre. He also gave a brief technical exposition of new developments in interactive proofs starting from the "IP for Muggles" paper of Goldwasser, Kalai and Rothblum. This topic is quite dear to me right now, given that my student Samira Daruki just defended a thesis that is at least partly about interactive proofs where the verifier is extremely weak (aka streaming). I'll have more to say about this later.

One can only hope the video of Oded's talk will be available online soon: it's can't miss-TV :).

(I'm keeping these posts short in the hope that I'll actually write them. The danger in longer posts is that they never get written). 

No comments:

Post a Comment

Disqus for The Geomblog