Vibrant area with many students and faculty from three departments
(CS, Math, GSIA)
Weekly in-house seminar series very wednesday
(beginning September 10, 7220 free pizza)
Weekly outside seminar (Friday 3:30)
As Guy bragged in his lecture for the open house:
CMU had 14 papers in this year's SODA conference.
Much collaboration between
theory people and others from all over SCS and the university.
Examples include many of the Aladdin Probes, Sangria project,
Blelloch+Acar+Harper on Dynamic algorithms,
Avrim + AI and CALD, Miller + everybody ....
Being a theory student doesn't mean trading your computer for a
pencil. Much of our work involves both proofs and
programming. Sometimes building systems. Sometimes doing
experiments to determine what is true. Sometimes required to find
out if a solution is really clean and efficient.
[In fact many great programmers from CMU were theory people...
Jim Aspnes, now at yale, Guy Jacobson, David Applegate, now at
ATT Labs...]