The rest of the proof is on the back. Mugshot by Rasmus Pagh.

Merchandise

Usually I’m not a big fan of conference merchandise—university branded ball point pens, T-shirts, bags, notepads… But boy, did I change my mind after ICALP 2010!

I saw little reason to unpack the coffee mug we got at the registration desk, and stuffed it in the conference bag. As did everybody else, I think. Only when I came home did I realise that the cup rattled. Was it broken? Intrigued, I opened the box, only to find a piece of chalk! The mug was a blackboard! We could have spent every coffee break eagerly scribbling proofs on our mugs.

Brilliant.

Presburger Award

The Presburger Award was awarded for the first time in at the Bordeaux ICALP. The award goes to a young scientist, and the 2010 recipient is Mikolaj Bojanczyk from Warsaw for his work in automata theory, logic, and algebra.

The EATCS awards session at ICALP included this award and two more: The Gödel prize and the EATCS award. Each recipient gave a talk, and young Mikolaj faced the thankless task of appearing in a session with some of the best speakers in our field, Sanjeev Arora, Joe Mitchell, and Kurt Mehlhorn, who all gave splendid presentations.

Well, Mikolaj’s speech blew me away. Instead of explaining his research contributions, he devoted the talk to the life and work of fellow Varsovian Mojzesz Presburger (1904–1943).

Not only was this graceful, interesting, and moving, it was also extremely well presented. I say this as somebody who obsesses about presentations.

Mikolaj’s visual aids break the slides metaphor we are used to, no matter which medium—35 mm, overhead transparency, computer projector. You can see Mikolaj’s Presburger Award presentation at his website. Check out his other ICALP 2010 presentation as well: his “slides” pan and zoom about on a single, huge, dynamic canvas. I’ve tried to do something similar a few times, but this is better by orders of magnitude.

• ICALP 2010 business meeting