I have been blogged!

Thanks to Amardeep for linking me from his blog! That was a nice surprise. Ever since that, I have been under a self-imposed pressure to keep up the writing! I would like to add that conversations with him have always been quite thought provoking - the last time we met up in Bombay we discussed a gamut of topics - from Ed Said & the Zionist movements (I really didnt know the differences between Zionism and anti-Semitism, so much for my reading:)) to the modernism of Rabindranath Tagore.

Why is the question "Is P=NP?" important?

There was this recent article on Technology Review by Simon Garfinkel, a researcher in computer security at MIT on the relevance on the question "Is P=NP?" as it relates to computer security. The question whether P equals NP has been on the seven "Millenium Problems" by the Clay Mathematics Institute of Cambridge, MA.

There is a nice overview article of the relationship between P and NP, although I was a bit surprised to see that he mentions that mathematicians and theoretical computer scientists are "racing to dismantle" this fragile foundation. I am not a theoretical CS guy, but I think Lance Fortnow's recent post on this article made sense - that mathematicians are not really in a race to prove (or disprove) the question.

Here is a superb overview paper on the P versus NP debate by Michael Sipser, a pioneer of theoretical CS and complexity theory at MIT, that includes a translation of letters from Godel to Von Neuman on the topic.