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Surfing with Rod

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Book cover Computability and Complexity

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10010))

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Abstract

I wish Rod a happy birthday. Rod has offered a good historical account of our early days of collaboration in his paper, “The Birth and Early Days of Parameterized Complexity” [D12]. One of the themes of our life-long collaboration has been a shared passion for surfing, and many of our best ideas were hammered out on surf trips. This contribution is best viewed as a gloss on that earlier account by Rod, taking as an organizing skeleton, our various surf trips and what we were thinking about, with a particular emphasis on open problems and horizons that remain, and some reflections on the formation of our research community.

M.R. Fellows—Research supported by the Bergen Research Foundation, the Government of Norway through its Elite Professorship Program, and the Australian Research Council.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Most surfers do not surf alone, because it is a statistically proven fact that if you do not surf alone, your chances of being taken by a shark are improved by at least fifty percent.

  2. 2.

    Stand-up surfers look down on body-boarders, but they shouldn’t! Body-boarders can routinely catch waves that stand-up guys can’t, because bodyboarders have stronger sprinting ability, and the stability to handle a lip-launch as the wave breaks “late” (which involves flying through the air a bit). One could go on about this. There are lots of ways to have fun in the waves. When I first met Rod, he was a hand-gunner, which is a rare practice (except in Queensland) closely related to plain old body-surfing.

  3. 3.

    This is a mainstay of the community. There is a sort of informal award system for the best young researchers in the field, which is to receive a copy of what we call “Mr. Opinion” — this is the book: The New Guide to Modern World Literature by Martin Seymour-Smith.

  4. 4.

    This is not unheard-of in mathematics, that smaller “dimensions” require special approaches.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics, University of Bergen, P.O. Box 7803, 5020, Bergen, Norway

    Michael R. Fellows

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  1. Michael R. Fellows
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Correspondence to Michael R. Fellows .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

    Adam Day

  2. University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Michael Fellows

  3. Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

    Noam Greenberg

  4. University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Bakhadyr Khoussainov

  5. Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand

    Alexander Melnikov

  6. University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Frances Rosamond

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Fellows, M.R. (2017). Surfing with Rod. In: Day, A., Fellows, M., Greenberg, N., Khoussainov, B., Melnikov, A., Rosamond, F. (eds) Computability and Complexity. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10010. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50062-1_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50062-1_2

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