William Gasarch

Gasarch received his doctorate in computer science from Harvard in 1985, advised by Harry R. Lewis. His thesis was titled Recursion-Theoretic Techniques in Complexity Theory and Combinatorics.^[4] He was hired into a tenure track professorial job at the University of Maryland in the Fall of 1985. He was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 1991, and to full professor in 1998.^[5]

Gasarch co-founded (with Richard Beigel) the field of Bounded Queries in Recursion Theory^[6] and has written many papers in the area capped off by a book on the topic co-authored with Georgia Martin, titled Bounded Queries in Recursion Theory.^[7] He has published books such as Problems with a Point,^[8] a book with a broad view on mathematics and theoretical computer science which he co-authored with Clyde Kruskal and includes works by other professors such as David Eppstein.^[9] He also co-founded the subfield of recursion-theoretic inductive inference named Learning via Queries^[10] with Carl Smith. More recently he has been more involved with combinatorics, notably Ramsey Theory.^[11][12][13] He has written three surveys of what theorists think of the P vs NP problem: in 2002, 2012, and 2019.^[14][15][16] In 2020 he wrote Mathematical Muffin Morsels: Nobody Wants a Small Piece with Erik Metz, Jacob Prinz, and Daniel Smolyak. ^[17]

Lance Fortnow began writing a blog on theoretical computer science with an emphasis on complexity theory in 2002.^[18] Gasarch was a frequent guest blogger until 2007 when he became an official co-blogger.