Suresh, Scott, and Lance have already announced the list of 78 papers accepted to STOC 2006. As Suresh points out, there's lots of cool geometry papers this year, and oh yeah, some other stuff, too. (I wonder if it's the same Santa Claus problem.)
PC member Piotr Indyk tells me there were 288 papers submitted to STOC this year, so the acceptance rate was 27.1% (or as Piotr actually put it, 27.083333333333333333%). This is the largest number of submissions in STOC history, but just barely—there were 287 submissions in 2002. This is also the second-lowest acceptance rate in STOC history, at least as far back as I have stats. The theory community's early-00s growth spurt seems to be holding strong. Here's the chart (also in pdf format):
SOCG results will be out Real Soon Now; stay tuned!
Different Santa Claus problem. This one is about max-min load balancing problems, i.e. making sure that no kid is very unhappy with his Christmas haul.
Posted by: D. Eppstein | February 02, 2006 at 11:52 AM
Santa Claus has a lot of problems.
Posted by: JeffE | February 02, 2006 at 12:27 PM
And where the heck is Philadeplpia, anyway?
Posted by: D. Eppstein | February 02, 2006 at 02:47 PM
off hand, what plotting program did you use to generate this pdf?
Posted by: | February 02, 2006 at 03:14 PM
Why, in Pennsyvlvnia, of course.
Adobe FreeHand, starting with a chart from an AppleWorks spreadsheet.
Posted by: JeffE | February 03, 2006 at 10:19 AM