Algorithmics, Social choice, Market Design, and Other Topics

Amartya Sen takes a  philosophical angle on social choice and welfare theory as he discusses the idea of justice.

Ever wondered how to sell or explain the importance of your favourite research topic to a lay-person? The Visions for Theoretical Computer Science Team has put together a wonderful advertisement for what theoretical computer science is about and what it seeks to do. Check it out from here .

The Economist has an obituary of Martin Gardner  in a recent issue : ---------------------- WHERE literacy meets numeracy, enthusiasm meets scepticism and philosophy meets fun, there you find Martin Gardner. He earned his crust by writing, but his abiding interest was in maths, and his gift, or rather one of them, was to explain mathematical concepts in ways that made sense to non-mathematicians. Many of them not only understood what he wrote but also became infected with his love of maths, of its beauty and of its capacity to give satisfaction, if not delight, when its riddles were solved and its paradoxes explained. For 25 years he provided both the puzzlement and the demystification in a column in Scientific American. Mr Gardner did not come to this task from MIT or Caltech. Indeed, he had no formal maths training after high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. But he did come from a job in journalism, to be precise, from a post at Humpty Dumpty’s Magazine for Little Children, whe...