

Meet the 2012 MacArthur Fellows - clbrook
http://www.macfound.org/fellows/class/2012/

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dude_abides
The only person on the list whose work I'm somewhat aware of is Dan Spielman.
His works, especially smoothed analysis, is definitely something that HN folks
will appreciate.

Smoothed analysis answers the question why many popular algorithms have
exponential big-O time but still work so well in practice. Average case
complexity also answers that question but computing it requires us to know the
probability distribution of the input space in advance. The idea of smoothed
complexity is simply to add random perturbation to the input and then measure
the worst case. Eg. simplex method has exponential big-O complexity but
polynomial smoothed complexity.

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Codhisattva
Chris Thile is the Beethoven of his generation.

[Edit to fix my silly typo]

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zwieback
Wow that's going a bit far although I admit he's a pretty great mando player
albeit a bit showy. I saw him live with Edgar Meyer and my ears almost fell
off.

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moultano
Have you listened to The Blind Leaving The Blind? It's pretty incredible. I
don't think it's canonical-piece-of-culture-after-300-years incredible, but
still, pretty incredible.

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zwieback
No, but I will now. Thanks for the tip.

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yskchu
For the computer science entry:

Daniel Spielman, Yale University Professor

<http://www.macfound.org/fellows/877/>

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nancyhua
Junot Diaz was my writing teacher at MIT. "Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar
Wao." He's really into comic books, the apocalypse, Dominican immigrants, New
Jersey.

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stephengillie
Are any on HN?

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untog
I very much doubt it. HN's audience is actually really very specific.

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jcoder
Literally actually really very specifically specific.

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zachrose
Literally, a veritable niche of actual specificity.

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taliesinb
Is it me or are these Reddit-like joke nests a new phenomenon on HN?

