On Saturday, I had my last Illinois Tech graduation as dean before I step down at the end of June. The College of Computing had nearly 1600 graduates and I shook many, many hands that morning.
After graduation I caught a plane to Washington, DC to attend the wedding of my daughter’s college friend. We were invited because we became good friends with the bride’s parents when we lived in Atlanta. My last trip before Covid was to DC for an NSF panel and this was my first trip to Washington since.Â
The out-of-town guests were housed at the Hyatt Regency Bethesda, coincidentally the same hotel that hosted STOC 2009. My favorite STOC talk of all time took place in that building. But I remembered nothing about the venue except for the jogging path near the hotel.
No trip to the DMV would be complete without seeing my co-blogger Bill Gasarch in person for the first time in years. We chatted about many things, most notably his last few posts where he joked about the new pope’s undergraduate math thesis, taken seriously by both our readers and ChatGPT. I reminded Bill that we are the blog of record, often used by wikipedia as a primary source for much in and out of complexity. Later Bill took out the fake thesis titles.
With graduation behind me, not much more for me to do as dean before my term ends. On the plane ride home, I thought about the question everyone asks me: What’s next? I have no idea, but it’s going to be fun.