Andrzej Tomczak (12 IX 1922 – 8 II 2017)

Remembering a Giant in Economics: Kenneth J. Arrow (1922-2017).

Kenneth J. Arrow (1922–2017) substantially transformedmany areas of economics. His doctoral dissertation [1] redefined the field of social choice with his famous “impossibility theorem,” leading him to receive the Economics Nobel Prize in 1972. He made major contributions in general equilibrium theory, operations research, and statistics. But perhaps in no field of economic thinking did he have...

Contents: (Adv. Sci. 12/2017)

Lecture 12 : April 13 , 2017

Last Time During the last lecture we completed an argument for a 2 1 d−1 ) lower bound for depth-d circuits for parity (PAR) using Hastad’s Switching Lemma [H̊as87], which stated that, for f : {0, 1} → {−1, 1}, if CNFwidth(f) = t, Pρ←Rp(DNFwidth(f ρ) = s) ≥ (7ps) We proved the Weak Switching Lemma, asserting a (40ps2) lower bound for this probability as opposed to the tighter bound given by the ...

Andrzej Nowak

The uses and abuses of history are many. Most of them stem from the search for power rather than the truth. In a post-totalitarian country, the misremembered past may be used both against the previous regime and in its defense. From the perspective of “pure scholarship” both cases are deplorable, but the latter seems more obviously dangerous. Here we examine a few examples of this tendency in c...

Contents: (Adv. Sci. 8/2017)

Bye bye palladium. Kai A. I. Zhang and coworkers develope a palladium-free and photocatalytic Stille-type coupling reaction of aryl iodides and aryl stannanes by a conjugated micro porous polymer-based photocatalyst under visible light irradiation at room temperature in article number 1700101. Via the aryl radical-mediated reaction pathway, the light-promoted coupling reaction using a pure orga...