Gary Hoppenworth

OpenAI Math Dump Hits My Home Recent OpenAI math dump have solutions to many long standing probems in Math and TCS. Two problems that I and my friends, notably Arnold Filtser, have studied for more than a decade: L1 embedding conjectures. minorfree.github.io/OpenAIDump/

It turns out someone posted a third polyhedron with this property to arxiv a week ago lol arxiv.org/pdf/2609.177...

Today I learned there are only two known polyhedra in which each face shares an edge with every other face. One of them being the timeless beauty of the tetrahedron and the other one being whatever the heck this is

Currently, their privacy policy says that they do not use users' content, but content can be a loaded word. I am already writing everything on my local LaTeX and only share with my coauthors when I feel it is ready. Might as well move to SVN and GitHub in the future.

For sale: lower bound, never reached

That’s a screaming algorithm 😱

Terrifying notation 😭

Can we flip the script so that AI creates interesting open math problems for humans to work on?

Very proud of my awesome student Nikhil Shagrithaya @nikhilshagri.bsky.social for successfully defending his Ph.D. thesis! This is a culmination of great work on challenging core questions in coding theory. Nikhil's research has been published in top CS venues, including FOCS and STOC conferences.

I got a whimsical suggested reply from my phone today

Sujoy Bhore, Hsien-Chih Chang, Jonathan Conroy, Arnold Filtser, Eunjin Oh, Nicole Wein, Da Wei Zheng: DAG Covers: The Steiner Point Effect https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04186 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.04186 https://arxiv.org/html/2604.04186

Greg Bodwin, Luba Samborska: Improved Upper Bounds for the Directed Flow-Cut Gap https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03412 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.03412 https://arxiv.org/html/2604.03412

Nikhil Bansal, Milind Prabhu, Sahil Singla, Siddharth M. Sundaram: Online Graph Balancing and the Power of Two Choices https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04159 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.04159 https://arxiv.org/html/2604.04159

Bernhard Haeupler, Yonggang Jiang, Thatchaphol Saranurak: DAG Projections: Reducing Distance and Flow Problems to DAGs https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04752 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.04752 https://arxiv.org/html/2604.04752

Our snow soufflé has risen.

I tried to access epubs.siam.org from the SODA hotel WiFi and it seems like we have all been blocked haha #soda26

The info and slides of the 18 🎓 "Graduating Bits" participants are now available on the website! Look at them, hire them! focs.computer.org/2025/graduat...

Stoked about the new work with Édouard Bonnet, Tuukka Korhonen, Jason Li, and Tomáš Masařík: a simple linear time algorithm to find a balanced separator in minor-free graphs. A more detailed blog post, giving a complete pseudocode: minorfree.github.io/SepLinear/ Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2512.01587

The directed next-to-shortest path problem was solved by 2 undergrads! arxiv.org/abs/2511.04345 Look out for Kuowen Chen and Yiran Zhang this PhD application cycle.

\'Edouard Bonnet, Tuukka Korhonen, Hung Le, Jason Li, Tom\'a\v{s} Masa\v{r}\'ik: Separator Theorem for Minor-Free Graphs in Linear Time https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01587 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01587 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.01587

I hate conference deadlines, but somehow, deadlines make magic happen. A week ago, we had a jumble of texts, but now we have what looks like a nice paper.

The connection between distributed algorithms and descriptive set theory featured in Quanta: www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-bridge...

I used AI to create an easier-to-navigate schedule for SODA and SOSA 26 here: soda26.netlify.app The original one is hard to see the overview. meetings.siam.org/program.cfm?...

Kuowen Chen, Nicole Wein, Yiran Zhang: A Polynomial-Time Algorithm for the Next-to-Shortest Path Problem on Positively Weighted Directed Graphs https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04345 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.04345 https://arxiv.org/html/2511.04345

📢 Our first TCS+ talk of the season will be Wednesday, Oct 8 (10amPT, 1pm ET, 19:00 CEST): Janani Sundaresan, from U Waterloo, will tell us how "Distributed Triangle Detection is Hard in Few Rounds"! RSVP to receive the link (available one day prior to the talk): forms.gle/sHdV8uoKYVpq... #TCSSky

Some questions on spanners in my talk at the Simons Institute. Since the talk, progress has been made on a few questions, but most are open. minorfree.github.io/SpannerQues/