Max Perutz (1914–2002)

Max Perutz (1914–2002)

Become a scientist, Ernest Rutherford would urge his friends, for then you will never be old, you will remain all your life a child at play. So it proved for the evergreen Max Perutz, who did his last experiment only weeks before he died at the fine age of eighty-seven. Perutz embraced Noël Coward's dictum that 'work is fun, work is much more fun than fun'. In an eventful life, beset in its ear...

Max Perutz (1914–2002) Great Scientist and Modest Leader

Obituary support for his work, and, in this, he was also singularly successful. In an article reviewing a biography of Ruther-ford (one of Max's early heroes), Max says he was disappointed to find the famous Cavendish Laboratory poorly equipped when he arrived and explains his view that Rutherford's failure to raise enough money to equip the Laboratory properly was a weakness shared by Bragg. M...

Random Max 2-sat and Max Cut

Given a 2-SAT formula F consisting of n variables and b n random clauses, what is the largest number of clauses maxF satisfiable by a single assignment of the variables? We bound the answer away from the trivial bounds of 34 n and n. We prove that for < 1, the expected number of clauses satisfiable is b n o(1); for large , it is ( 34 + (p ))n; for = 1 + ", it is at least (1 + " O("3))n and at m...

Modelling Max-CSP as Partial Max-SAT

We define a number of original encodings that map MaxCSP instances into partial Max-SAT instances. Our encodings rely on the well-known direct and support encodings from CSP into SAT. Then, we report on an experimental investigation that was conducted to compare the performance profile of our encodings on random binary Max-CSP instances. Moreover, we define a new variant of the support encoding...

Max Wellington