Computational Complexity

Thursday, April 17, 2008

 
My First Grand Student

Posted by Lance

Today I am in Madison, Wisconsin where Scott Diehl has just defended his thesis. Scott's advisor, Dieter van Melkebeek, was my advisee at Chicago, making Scott my first Grand Student. I've waited a long time for a grand student, my first student Carsten Lund graduated back in 1991. But Carsten went to AT&T and my next student Lide Li also went into industry. But now with three students in academia (including Sophie Laplante at Paris-Sud and Rahul Santhanam going to Edinburgh), Scott will be the first of many.

Actually what I really want is an infinite tree below me, but König's lemma says I needed a grand student first.

Diehl's thesis is on time-space tradeoff's for satisfiability. I worked in this area about a decade ago then extended some of that work with Dieter who then worked on it with Scott, a passing of knowledge from generation to generation. The symbolism is so, umm, symbolic.

So as not to slight the other members of the family: Scott's academic aunt, my most recent student Varsha Dani, graduated last quarter. And just two days ago I was back at U. Chicago for Sourav Chakraborty's successful defense (Sourav is a student of Babai).

It's so nice to see the young ones grow up.

12:37 PM #

1.  Anonymous says:  
   
   The advisor-student relationship is indeed precious. In talking to my students, I find myself saying often "My advisor David Shmoys would say ..." (Oded has made a similar comment about his advisor Shimon Even).
   
   aravind srinivasan
   

   2:12 PM, April 17, 2008

2.  Scott Diehl says:  
   
   Thanks, Lance! I enjoyed having you on my committee!
   

   7:04 PM, April 17, 2008

3.  Anonymous says:  
   
   Also, aren't most of the Math/CS people academic descendants of Euler?
   

   10:10 PM, April 17, 2008

4.  Anonymous says:  
   
   Actually what I really want is an infinite tree below me, but König's lemma says I needed a grand student first.
   
   only if you limit yourself to finitely many students.
   

   2:16 AM, April 18, 2008

5.  Anonymous says:  
   
   Anonymous 3: No. At the Mathematics Genealogy Project there is an artificial link showing Lagrange as Euler's student. Lagrange, however, has no degree, hence no advisor.
   
   http://www.genealogy.ams.org/id.php?id=17864
   
   Therefore only about 1 in 50 Math/CS graduates have Euler in their pedigree.
   

   7:11 AM, April 21, 2008