Las Vegas Motor Speedway
On October 16, 2011, the final race of the 2011 IndyCar season, the IZOD IndyCar World Championship, was held at Las Vegas. However, the race was halted by a horrific crash on lap 11 that involved 15 cars, some of which became airborne, and some of which burst into flames. The crash began when Wade Cunningham made light contact with James Hinchcliffe, but the situation turned into a big pile-up of cars. The crash allowed a red flag to be waved almost instantly, due to the remains of the damaged cars and the amount of debris on the track.
Symposium on Discrete Algorithms
The Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA) is an academic conference in the fields of algorithm design and discrete mathematics. It is considered to be one of the top conferences for research in algorithms. SODA has been organized annually since 1990, typically in January. SODA is jointly sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT) and the SIAM Activity Group on Discrete Mathematics, and in format is more similar to a theoretical computer science conference than to a mathematics conference.