One of my favourite parts of teaching TCS is motivating concepts in a way that goes beyond just the definitions. When we cover grammars, I mention Pāṇini and his work on Sanskrit. Today, I wrote this fun little question. Can anyone familiar with Sanskrit tell me if I made any embarrassing mistakes?

A051070 (https://oeis.org/A051070) is a sequence about OEIS sequences. a(n) is the n-th term in sequence A`_`n (or -1 if A`_`n doesn't have enough terms). Archived at: https://www.jeremykun.com/shortform/2026-04-09-0556/

Either Best Buy is really diversifying their product offerings, or I’ve done something very strange to whatever recommendation algorithm served up this ad.

#Artemis II lunar flyby images are showing up! 😍 A crescent Earth setting behind the Moon.

The first astronaut in history to speak French while en route to the moon — Canada’s very own Jeremy Hansen 🇨🇦

HISTORY MADE! Orion Integrity and its Crew Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen have broken the 56 year old recod set by Apollo 13 and its crew James Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise, and have become the humans that have travelled the farthest distance from Earth.

Okay everyone, Artemis II is behind the moon. We've got about 30 minutes now to replace everyone in Mission Control with apes to make the crew think something happened while they were away.

Cross Country Canada is the greatest trucking simulator that ever existed. You didn’t grow up a Canadian millennial if you didn’t experience the pain of being towed because a pebble hit your windshield.

Good paragraph

i'm sorry but the moon is a complete boondoggle that should never have been put up there in the first place. we still have to send repair missions up there a hundred-plus years later all because taft was trailing in the polls and decided to learn magick. i don't know why he thought it would help him

I can't believe this is all building up to the biggest April Fools' reveal of all time: that the moon is fake and they're just going up there to change the bulb in the big spotlight.

On this Palm Sunday, we commemorate our lord and savior Palm III

Academic protip: Worried about collaborators/authors/anybody getting their submissions in by a certain deadline? Stop using AoE time (UTC−12) and start using Kiritimati time (UTC+14)!

you deserve a book

Absolute fumble calling this a “NeurIPS satellite event in Atlanta” instead of “DecaturIPS”.

This is something I've had to contend with in my own courses. I regularly tell students about Greibach (grammars), Goldwasser (zero-knowledge proofs), and Williams (matrix multiplication), but so many results in the core curriculum stem from the same group of guys and I don't know how to improve it.

I watched The Godfather for the very first time last night. And I suspect when I share this news with my friend group, they're going to react in exactly the same way as when I told them I first watched The Sound of Music just a couple of years ago.

The StFXAUT stands in solidarity with StFX students and students from other Nova Scotia universities as they rally against the provincial government’s recent cuts to post-secondary education. www.stfxaut.ca/solidarity-w...

Congratulations to Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard on receiving the 2025 ACM A.M. Turing Award! They are recognized for their essential role in establishing the foundations of quantum information science and transforming secure communication and computing. awards.acm.org/turing @umontreal

Please submit your research papers and join us at the 30th International Conference on Implementation and Application of Automata (CIAA 2026), to be held in Kingston, Canada from August 5 to 8, 2026! Details: research.cs.queensu.ca/ciaa2026/ #tcssky #mathsky

Please submit your research papers and join us at the 27th International Conference on Descriptional Complexity of Formal Systems (DCFS 2026), to be held in Kingston, Canada from August 9 to 11, 2026! Details: research.cs.queensu.ca/dcfs2026/ #tcssky #mathsky

I spent the weekend in Cape Breton—the very tip-top north of Cape Breton—and the accent of my inner monologue has yet to recover. I might accidentally drop a "b'y" while teaching this week.

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494459230781640628620899862803482534211706798214808651328230664709384460955058223172535940812848111745028410270193852110555964462294895493038196442881097566593344612847564823378678316527120190914564856692 🧵 1/∞

Turning Awardee Sir Tony Hoare passed away last Thursday at the age of 92. Jim Miles remembers.

How I introduce interactive proofs to students: "if the input shouldn't be accepted, then the prover can never get the verifier to accept no matter what certificate it provides." How I want to introduce interactive proofs to students:

Am I sleepy because of the time change, because of the wet, cold, cloudy weather outside, or simply because it’s Sunday?

An online seminar on formal languages & automata theory that always takes place at the same time on the same weekday had/has talks: - last week at 10am my time - in 2 weeks at 11am my time - 3 weeks after that at 10am my time Daylight saving is messing me up before it even happens.

A fascinating note by Don Knuth describing how Claude helped resolve a conjecture that he had posed for an upcoming chapter of TACP. I'm now worried that he will get distracted again, produce something incredible, and TACP will once again wither away :). www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/paper...

I fear I've gone down a bit of a rabbit hole over the course of this past week. Read on... Everyone (or at least, every computer scientist) knows there are two kinds of randomized algorithms: Las Vegas and Monte Carlo. But did you know there's a third? I did, or at least I thought I did.

Tim Houston continues his attack on the institutions that make this democracy worthwhile Morning File by @timbousquet.bsky.social

Age verification? I know how Caecilius and his missus died

Why does the Nova Scotia government want to cost universities hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars? Why have they spent almost half a million dollars on an American consulting firm? Find out more tonight! Online town hall (zoom link on linked page below) cocogov.org/blog/townhall/

Composers for the Olympics always seem to understand the assignment. This piece managed to bring together multiple Italian musical themes from across centuries, and the finale starting at 10:20 was a fantastic (pardon the pun) backdrop for each of the medal ceremonies.

Proud of Team Canada and proud to be Canadian 🇨🇦

in Canada we have a store called "Canadian Tire" and you're probably thinking "a store named after a tire definitely has a circle for a logo" but no, you're wrong. they chose a colossal red triangle

Some exciting professional news this week: the IEEE has awarded me a senior status to go along with the growing number of gray hairs on my head.

Valentine’s Day: tiresome, expected to spend money to show one’s love, exclusive of single people Flag Day: exciting, one can look at the flag for free, inclusive of everyone who appreciates waving fabric

A Valentine’s Day cartoon for @newscientist.com

Looking through the list of accepted papers for STOC 2026, I see a lot of impressive work, but also a huge emphasis on algorithms+complexity. It'd be nice to publish in one of these big theory conferences, but I don't imagine Eurotheory like automata+languages is what they're targeting anymore.

It's my first day of participating in NSERC Discovery Grant deliberation meetings, and I'm surviving so far! But check in with me again by the end of the week and we'll see if my answer stays the same.

In 1979, the “New York Times” asked Isaac Bashevis Singer if he planned to watch the Super Bowl.

Watching competitors at this level is always impressive. But seeing people say "he beat the guy without needing any high-tech shooting equipment!" is hilarious when said "high-tech shooting equipment" is two pieces of plastic.

Breaking: Tragedy at the Winter Olympics

New SIGACT award expository work, created in memory of Luca Trevisan: "intended to promote and recognize high-impact work expositing ideas and results from the Theory of Computation." A wonderful initiative—consider nominating people! ⏰ Nomination deadline: April 10 sigact.org/prizes/trevi...

When I was in London last summer, I was walking back to my hotel after dinner and had to wait at an intersection for the signal to change. As I waited, a fellow on a rental bicycle stopped right in front of me. In my post-dinner satiety, it took me a beat to realize that fellow was Rami Malek.

Here's a fun little afternoon distraction: what is the smallest value of n, 1 ≤ n ≤ 26, for which there does not exist an English word of length n starting with the nth letter of the English alphabet?

PSA: it is in fact possible for universities to address financial challenges by slashing (incredibly expensive and largely useless) admin positions. Memorial University just downsized VPs from 7 to 3. Yes we can! universityaffairs.ca/news/memoria...

Thomas Watson has a new computational complexity textbook about to be published by Cambridge University Press. There's a free version online for personal use. complexityincs.com

Hey, if the groundhog gets a snow day, I do too. I don’t make the rules.