Theory of Computation offers a rigorous mathematical framework that underpins our understanding of what can be computed and how efficiently these computations may be performed. It encompasses ...

In computational complexity theory, P and NP are two classes of problems. P is the class of decision problems that a deterministic Turing machine can solve in polynomial time. In useful terms, any ...

The prolific researcher found deep connections between randomness and computation and spent a career influencing cryptographers, complexity researchers and more. For more than 40 years, Avi Wigderson ...

The history of digital computing can be divided into an old testament and a new testament. The prophets of the old testament, led by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the 1670s, supplied the logic; those ...

Since the 1930s, the theory of computation has profoundly influenced philosophical thinking about topics such as the theory of the mind, the nature of mathematical knowledge and the prospect of ...

Part of “Complexity Theory,” a new column on the tangled questions of our technological age. The very first introductory seminar that I was enrolled in at Stanford was CS 56N: Great Inventions and ...

As a practising computer scientist, I thought I had a fairly good grasp of Alan Turing’s many contributions to the field. But The Turing Guide, by Jack Copeland, Jonathan Bowen, Mark Sprevak and Robin ...

On Saturday, British mathematician Alan Turing would have turned 100 years old. It is barely fathomable to think that none of the computing power surrounding us today was around when he was born. But ...

In the 1980s, an inkling emerged among some scientists that very disparate phenomena might on some deep level be related. The weather, protein folding, computers, evolution, the stock market, the ...