Last week, HP Labs mathematician Vinay Deolalikar started circulating a startling paper that claims to have solved the preeminent open problem in computer science, known as P = NP. Er, more accurately ...

In 1971, Dr. Stephen Cook, a young University of Toronto professor in the fledgling field of computer science, posed a theoretical problem so intractable it has become the subject of a $1-million ...

A few weeks ago I was listening to one of my favorite radio shows, BBC Radio 4's In Our Time. It's about as adult-contemporary as a podcast gets: a roundtable of British academics talking about one ...