The P=NP Question and Gödel's Lost Letter

? DoesP=NP. In just ?ve symbols Dick Karp -in 1972-captured one of the deepest and most important questions of all time. When he ?rst wrote his famous paper, I think it's fair to say he did not know the depth and importance of his question. Now over three decades later, we know P=NP is central to our understanding of compu- tion, it is a very hard problem, and its resolution will have potentially tremendous consequences. This book is a collection of some of the most popular posts from my blog- Godel ¨ Lost Letter andP=NP-which I started in early 2009. The main thrust of the blog, especially when I started, was to explore various aspects of computational complexity around the famousP=NP question. As I published posts I branched out and covered additional material, sometimes a timely event, sometimes a fun idea, sometimes a new result, and sometimes an old result. I have always tried to make the posts readable by a wide audience, and I believe I have succeeded in doing this.

Richard Lipton is the Storey Professor of Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology. Previously he held faculty positions at Yale University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Princeton University. His research is focused primarily, but not exclusively, on theory of computation. He has made seminal contributions to many areas of computing from software engineering and program testing, to computer security and cryptography, to DNA and molecular computation, and to other areas of computer science. He is a member of The National Academy of Engineering, an ACM Fellow, and a Guggenheim fellow.