Shtetl-Optimized

From my inbox:

We simple folk out in the cold wastes of the internet are dying the slow and horrible death of intellectual starvation. Only you can save us, by posting the next installment of your lecture notes before we shuffle off this mortal coil. Will you help us, or will you say “Let them read slashdot”? Ok, seriously, I know you’re busy. Just wanted to make sure you knew people are enjoying the lecture notes.

And from my comments section:

You know you’ve made it, and then lost it, when you no longer publish notes on your course 🙂

Alright, alright, alright, alright, alright. Now that I’ve returned from my two-week world concert tour (which took me to Innsbruck, London, Yale, and U. of Toronto), and now that my girlfriend and I have settled into a lovely new apartment (complete with silverware, shower curtains, and a giant poster of complexity class inclusions above the fireplace), I finally have some time to resume your regularly-scheduled programming.

So won’t you join me, as I attempt to excavate the strange forgotten world of paleocomplexity, and relive an age when STOC and FOCS were held in caves and Diagonalosaurs ruled the earth?

Follow

Bigger, longer, wackier. The topic: “Minds and Machines.”

Follow

Gödel, Turing, and Friends. Another whole course compressed into one handwaving lecture. (This will be a recurring theme.)

Follow

Cardinals, ordinals, and more. A whole math course compressed into one handwaving lecture, and a piping-hot story that’s only a century old.

Follow

That, for better or worse, is the name of a course I’m teaching this semester at the University of Waterloo. I’m going to post all of the lecture notes online, so that you too can enjoy an e-learning cyber-experience in my virtual classroom, even if you live as far away as Toronto. I’ve already posted Lecture 1, “Atoms and the Void.” Coming up next: Lecture 2.

Follow