Gary H

Our snow soufflé has risen.

I tried to access epubs.siam.org from the SODA hotel WiFi and it seems like we have all been blocked haha #soda26

The info and slides of the 18 🎓 "Graduating Bits" participants are now available on the website!

Look at them, hire them!
focs.computer.org/2025/graduat...

F☕️CS 2025!

I have heard Australians are very serious about their coffee. Is that true?

Stoked about the new work with Édouard Bonnet, Tuukka Korhonen, Jason Li, and Tomáš Masařík: a simple linear time algorithm to find a balanced separator in minor-free graphs.

A more detailed blog post, giving a complete pseudocode: minorfree.github.io/SepLinear/

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2512.01587

A Polynomial-Time Algorithm for the Next-to-Shortest Path Problem on Positively Weighted Directed Graphs Given a graph and a pair of terminals $s$, $t$, the next-to-shortest path problem asks for an $s\!\to \!t$ (simple) path that is shortest among all not shortest $s\!\to \!t$ paths (if one exists). Thi...

The directed next-to-shortest path problem was solved by 2 undergrads! arxiv.org/abs/2511.04345 Look out for Kuowen Chen and Yiran Zhang this PhD application cycle.

\'Edouard Bonnet, Tuukka Korhonen, Hung Le, Jason Li, Tom\'a\v{s} Masa\v{r}\'ik: Separator Theorem for Minor-Free Graphs in Linear Time https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01587 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01587 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.01587

I hate conference deadlines, but somehow, deadlines make magic happen. A week ago, we had a jumble of texts, but now we have what looks like a nice paper.

A New Bridge Links the Strange Math of Infinity to Computer Science | Quanta Magazine Descriptive set theorists study the niche mathematics of infinity. Now, they’ve shown that their problems can be rewritten in the concrete language of algorithms.

The connection between distributed algorithms and descriptive set theory featured in Quanta:
www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-bridge...

I used AI to create an easier-to-navigate schedule for SODA and SOSA 26 here:
soda26.netlify.app

The original one is hard to see the overview. meetings.siam.org/program.cfm?...

Kuowen Chen, Nicole Wein, Yiran Zhang: A Polynomial-Time Algorithm for the Next-to-Shortest Path Problem on Positively Weighted Directed Graphs https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04345 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.04345 https://arxiv.org/html/2511.04345

TCS+ RSVP: Janani Sundaresan (2025/10/08) Title: Distributed Triangle Detection is Hard in Few Rounds

📢 Our first TCS+ talk of the season will be Wednesday, Oct 8 (10amPT, 1pm ET, 19:00 CEST): Janani Sundaresan, from U Waterloo, will tell us how "Distributed Triangle Detection is Hard in Few Rounds"!

RSVP to receive the link (available one day prior to the talk): forms.gle/sHdV8uoKYVpq... #TCSSky

Lots of interesting questions! Thanks for sharing

Some questions on spanners in my talk at the Simons Institute. Since the talk, progress has been made on a few questions, but most are open. minorfree.github.io/SpannerQues/

I really enjoyed it, there were some awesome posters!

I downloaded it, but I found it almost unusable lol