(Lance Fortnow)
By Staff Reports
(Oahu)– Computer scientist Lance Fortnow will examine the role of bounded rationality in economics during a public talk, “Bounding Rationality With Computation,” from 11 to 11:50 a.m. on Friday, January 8, 2016, in the Physical Science Auditorium, room 217.
This is the keynote event of the 11th International Conference on Computability, Complexity and Randomness (CCR) being held on the UH Mānoa campus.
The presentation is free and open to the public.
Fortnow is currently Professor and Chair of the School of Computing at Georgia Tech, a leading researcher in computational complexity, and winner of the 2014 Nerode Prize, awarded by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science and the International Symposium on Parameterized and Exact Computation.
He is the author of The Golden Ticket: P, NP and the Search for the Impossible, a popular science book on the P versus NP problem published by Princeton University Press. The P versus NP problem, perhaps the most important open problem in mathematics, can be succinctly described as: Can every solved problem whose answer can be checked quickly by a computer also be quickly solved by a computer? A certain kind of affirmative answer to the problem may have great impact on computer security, breaking most existing cryptosystems.
Lance Fortnow’s work in economics includes game theory, optimal strategies and prediction. The 2008 financial crisis highlighted the acute problem of bounded rationality. Financial securities such as CDOs (Credit Default Obligations) were packaged in such a way as to make it very difficult for computers, and even more so humans, to evaluate their fair price and risk.
The CCR conference is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the Association for Symbolic Logic, the Association for Women in Mathematics, and the Department of Mathematics in the College of Natural Sciences at UH Mānoa.