Andy's Math/CS page

Monday, May 09, 2011

An exciting new textbook, and a request

Today I'd like to put out an appeal to readers. If you have a solid grasp of English and an interest in circuit complexity (no expertise required!), please consider helping proofread the forthcoming book "Boolean Function Complexity: Advances and Frontiers" by Stasys Jukna.

Stasys (whom I recently had the pleasure to meet at an enjoyable Dagstuhl seminar in Germany) is a talented researcher and a kind, gracious person; he's also worked tirelessly to produce high-quality textbooks for our community. I'm a long-time fan of his "Extremal Combinatorics: With Applications in Computer Science" which contains many gems of combinatorial reasoning in complexity theory.

His latest manuscript, to be published soon, promises to be a leading reference for circuit lower-bounds research. Although I've only read parts, it clearly achieves both depth and breadth; I really think anyone in the field could learn something new and useful here.

The main cause for concern is that Stasys (who hails from Lithuania) is not a native English speaker, and the text needs work in places to become grammatically correct and idiomatic. Also, it seems a full-time copy-editor is not available for this project.
So readers: by volunteering to proofread a chapter or two, you'll be doing a valuable service for present and future students of complexity theory. Language editing is the essential thing--you can skim over the equations, so it really doesn't take that long. (Of course, mathematical feedback is also welcome.)

The manuscript is available here; use the following login info:
User: friend
Password: catchthecat

You can email Stasys your comments. The text is long (500+ pages), so if you do or are planning to do some editing, please enter your name, the chapters you'll edit, and a timeframe in the comments below. This will allow others to maximize our coverage of the draft.

Thanks in advance for your help!

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