More Interview With Kurt Gödel
Part II of the GLL exclusive
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| By permission of Vi Hart, mathemusiciartist: source |
Kurt Gödel has assented to our publishing the second part of the interview we conducted with him a year ago.
We had his assent to begin with, but issues of time are unclear in this type of situation, and with this kind of super-luminary one can never be too careful. We also needed his help in transcribing this second part. What happened is that as the collective human consciousness realized that the discovery of naturally-occurring faster-than-light neutrinos had failed owing to a loose cable, the effect our setup relied on faded and disappeared. Gödel compensated by spinning up enough artificial neutrinos to transmit what was recorded on his end. However, he could not do this until All Hallows Day came around again, which was Thursday.
Read more…
Mathematical Mischief Night
Real implications from a fake-paper prank?
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Marcie Rathke was not among the speakers whose talks I heard at the Algorithms Workshop at St. John’s College, Oxford University, two weeks ago. She is “famous” for her recent paper, “Independent, Negative, Canonically Turing Arrows of Equations and Problems in Applied Formal PDE,” which was just accepted by the journal Advances in Pure Mathematics. Her paper could have been presented at the Oxford workshop since solving PDE’s is a vital algorithmic task, Oxford is known for formal approaches, and this was part of Oxford’s observance of the Turing Centennial. But it was not.
Today, October 30th, the eve of Halloween, is often called “Mischief Night.” It is a night when many children play tricks before they receive their treats on the next night—Halloween. Thus today is a good time to think about tricks and possible treats in the world of mathematics and theory.
Short and Tweet
Proofs that are about the length of a tweet.
Jack Dorsey is the creator of Twitter. We thank him for the creation of of tweets, which are of course messages of up to 140 characters in length.
Today Ken and I wish to talk about very short proofs—proofs that could almost fit into a single tweet.
It’s a fun topic, but also touches on a serious one: what is a proof really supposed to do?
These proofs must be hard to find but quick to verify, which is the essential idea of 
Euler’s Example
Let’s look at problems whose solutions fit into a single tweet, or almost.
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Algorithms At Oxford
A report on a recent workshop at Oxford University
Joël Ouaknine, Georg Gottlob, and Andreas Pieris are faculty at Oxford University in St. John’s College. They recently held a workshop on algorithms to celebrate the creation of an algorithms group within the computer science department.
Today I wish to give a report on the talks that were given at the workshop.
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One Man’s Floor Is Another Man’s Ceiling
Factoring again, always factoring…
Peter Borwein is among those who carry forward the title mission of Alan Turing’s famous paper, “On Computable Numbers…” With David Bailey and Simon Plouffe, he found a new kind of fast formula for computing individual digits of 
Today we discuss a recent survey paper with his co-author Joe Hobart on the power of division.
My Thing About The “Thing” Movies
A geometric puzzle based on the Thing movies
James Arness was not a scientist, but was an actor who is best known for having played Marshall Dillon in the long-running TV series “Gunsmoke.” This series had a 20-year run, unheard of nowadays for scripted shows with actors that are animate, as opposed to animated.
Today I wish to raise a puzzle about an earlier movie that he starred in called The Thing.
What’s Blue and White and Red All Over?
Election and debate special from GLL—note update
Aram Harrow is both a computer scientist and a physicist—something that makes him unique and special. Few people can explain what a probabilistic Turing Machine is and also what complementarity is. He has done some beautiful work in pure and applied mathematics, work that uses his dual abilities.
Today Dick and I wish to describe and interpret an intricate recent theorem of his in a joint paper with Alexandra Kolla and Leonard Schulman. Read more…
Quantum Supremacy or Classical Control?
Final summations of the Kalai-Harrow debate
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William Unruh is a professor in the Theoretical Physics group of the University of British Columbia. He is known for the Unruh effect, which predicts that an accelerating observer will feel radiation that an observer in constant motion will not. This does not contradict relativity, but experimental tests have so far produced debatable results. He also wrote a paper soon after Peter Shor’s famous algorithm appeared in 1994, showing how quantum noise would swamp a direct implementation of it. This was an early spur for quantum error correction, and Unruh is said to have withdrawn his skepticism after the quantum fault-tolerance theorem was established.
Today we conclude our debate between Gil Kalai and Aram Harrow on the scalability of quantum computers. What is our computational world—our mundus computationalis?—one with quantum supremacy or classical control?
Why We Lose Sleep Some Nights
Is the end of the world uncomfortably close?
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Derek de Solla Price created scientometrics, which is “the science of measuring and analyzing science.” You can tell you’re a natural theoretician if you instantly think, what happens when scientometrics is applied to itself? But there is no paradox of self-reference here, because scientometrics per se is applied to the science of the past, to papers that have already been published. Yet we who are doing science have to look ahead to impact on the future, and that involves unpublished possibilities.
Today Ken and I want to discuss what keeps us worried sometimes.
How Not To Prove Integer Factoring Is In P
A possible barrier to proofs that factoring is in polynomial time
Mihalis Yannakakis is a Knuth Prize-winning complexity theorist and database expert. With Christos Papadimitriou in 1988, he framed the systematic study of approximation algorithms for 
Today I want to talk about a “barrier” to many attempts to prove that integer factoring is in polynomial time, including a recent one that drew on ideas that were first applied to Traveling Salesman and related problems.
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