Proceedings of the thirty-seventh annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing

Abstract

The papers in this volume were presented at the Thirty-Seventh Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2005), held in Baltimore, Maryland, May 22-24, 2005. The Symposium was sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT).On May 21, the day before STOC, there was a commemoration of Larry Stockmeyer, who died on July 31, 2004. For this tribute, which was organized by Tutorials Chair Cynthia Dwork, there was a tutorial by Nicholas Pippenger on some of Stockmeyer's fundamental results in complexity theory, followed by lectures by Miklos Ajtai, Anne Condon, Cynthia Dwork, Richard Karp, Albert Meyer, and Christopher Umans. On the following day, Lance Fortnow continued the tribute with an invited talk and paper, which appears in these proceedings, on the work and legacy of Larry Stockmeyer.In response to a Call for Papers, 290 submissions were received by the submission deadline of November 4, 2004, 5:59pm EST. All were submitted electronically on the ACM SIGACT server website. One paper was a duplicate, and four papers were eventually withdrawn.The Program Committee began its deliberations electronically on January 4, and continued in that medium until its meeting at the IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, California, on January 21-22, where all final decisions were made. Of the 21 Program Committee members, 19 attended the Program Committee meeting in San Jose, and the other two participated through a full-time conference call.The Program Committee selected 84 papers for presentation. The paper "Undirected ST-Connectivity in Log-Space", by Omer Reingold, was selected for the STOC Best Paper Award. The paper "A O(log n log log n) Space Algorithm for Undirected Connectivity", by Vladimir Trifonov, was selected for the Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award.The submissions were not refereed, and many of these papers represent reports of continuing research. It is expected that most of them will appear in a more polished and complete form in scientific journals.