Letter from the Director, November 2021

Dear friends,

This month, an article showing that sleeping longer than 6.5 hours a night may be bad for your health popped up in my Google feed. It made me realize yet again why theory and mathematics are so satisfying — at least the soundness of theorems doesn’t change every decade.

In this issue of the newsletter, we’re pleased to share an excerpt of an article on P vs. NP written by our former journalist in residence Siobhan Roberts. The full piece appeared last month in the MIT Technology Review and was inspired in part by her visit to the Simons Institute.

Last month, as you may recall, we released the first of three interviews on the Foundations of Computing, within our Polylogues web series. Today, we’re sharing the second episode, featuring cryptographer Tal Rabin.

Also in our SimonsTV corner, we have Andrea Montanari’s popular Richard M. Karp Distinguished Lecture from earlier this fall, Computational Barriers in Statistical Estimation and Learning.

All the best, 
Shafi

Shafi Goldwasser
Director, Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing