Allon Percus is Associate Director of the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA, and a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from the University of Paris, Orsay, in 1997. His research has combined statistical physics, discrete mathematics, and computer science, focusing primarily on local search algorithms in combinatorial optimization. He has organized numerous conferences and workshops on combinatorics, phase transitions, and algorithmic complexity. Gabriel Istrate is a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in the...