STOC09 just ended a few days ago. I really enjoyed it.
I met quite a few brilliant chinese theory students. Most of them are knowledgeable and sharp and more importantly
,have a very good taste of theory. Talking to them was a lot fun.
I listened to a lot talks. Basically, for all these talk, it was simply impossible to understand in 20 min the technical details
which are typically considered the major reason for the acceptance of the paper to stoc. However, a notable exception
is one of the two best papers by Moser, a 3-slides-constructive proof of the lovasz local lemma.
The creativity and simplicity of the proof are remarkable.
Check out Lance's blog on this topic for a very short description of this proof.
