Locating SODA outside the US
David Johnson forwards a note from the SODA Steering Committee about the possibility of having SODA outside the US. Summary: it can be done, with the kind of bid information that accompanies bids to other conferences with independent local arrangement. What follows is the note:To those who might be interested in having a future SODA conference take place outside North America:As you may know, local arrangements for SODA have to date always been handled by SIAM. The conference Department at SIAM has wide experience in organizing conferences in North America, but typically relies on help from local organizers when a conference they sponsor takes place els

Anathem, and mathematical stereotypes
Neal Stephenson is (or should be !) a familiar figure in the sci-fi/speculative fiction landscape: his Cryptonomicon is a retelling of the story of Turing, along with much modern day drama involving advanced crypto and security. His new book, Anathem, came out with much fanfare, and is a vast tale set in a place where mathematics is a pursuit conducted in monastery-like places with strong religious overtones.I'm reading Anathem right now, and am only at the beginning (so no spoilers please), but there's already a beautifully rendered discourse on stereotypes of the mathematica

Soviet-style mathematics
Via Anand Kulkarni (aka polybot) comes an interesting article in the WSJ by Masha Gessen on Grigori Perelman, Soviet-era mathematics and the question of 'big math'. The premise of the article (Masha Gessen has a book out on Perelman and the Poincare conjecture) is that special environments are needed to prove big results, and the Soviet-era mathematical enclaves fostered this environment both because of, and inspite of the Soviet political system. It is indeed true that amazing work came out of the isolated confines of Soviet mathematical institutes, often parallel to or well before similar work in the Western world. The

Innovation in Computer Science
As the polylogblogdogslogglog blog points out, the ICS results are out. 39 papers were accepted in all - at some point I knew the number of submissions, but I've forgotten since.The ICS folks didn't make life easy for themselves by explicitly stating that they wanted "conceptual contributions". But looking over the list of papers, a few things come to mind:It's a great list of papers. Nothing to complain about really, and any of these could have been a credible paper at FOCS/STOCThe Arora et al paper on

What is computational topology ?
Jeff's post on his computational topology class (and the wonderful class outline), prompted me to write about something that I've tried to explain to people before. Computational topology is arguably the hottest thing in SoCG-land right now, and has been so for a number of years (for curious folk, the "other" hot topic is high dimensional approximate geometry). But if you ask different people, you'll get different answers to the question "what is computational topology ?". I've even had to explain to local students