Author Archives: Gil Kalai

Postoctoral Positions Available

Maybe I should say that (like every year but even more so) we do have funding for 1-2 postdoctoral positions in combinatorics, for 1-3 years starting in the next academic year (the time is flexible) here at the Hebrew University … Continue reading

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Dorit Aharonov’s on TEDx: A Feldenkrais lesson for the beginner scientist

Here is a lovely lecture starting with quantum computers, going through the Feldenkrais method, and ending with a mathematical puzzle. Click on the picture for the video of the talk. Here are Dorit’s four body-mind principles for learning: 1. Start … Continue reading

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Angry Bird Skepticism

Lenore Holditch is a freelance writer. Here is what she wrote to me: “I love learning about new topics, so I am confident that I can provide valuable content for your blog on any topic you wish, else I can … Continue reading

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The Privacy Paradox of Rann Smorodinsky

   The following paradox was raised by Rann Smorodinsky: Rann Smorodinsky’s Privacy Paradox Suppose that you have the following one-time scenario. You want to buy a sandwich where the options are a roast beef sandwich or an avocado sandwich. Choosing … Continue reading

Posted in Games, Philosophy, Rationality | Tagged , , | 17 Comments

Happy Birthday Ron Aharoni!

Ron Aharoni, one of Israel’s and the world’s leading combinatorialists celebrated his birthday last month. This is a wonderful opportunity to tell you about a few of the things that Ron did mainly around matching theory. Menger’s theorem for infinite … Continue reading

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A Few Mathematical Snapshots from India (ICM2010)

Can you find Assaf in this picture? (Picture: Guy Kindler.) In my post about ICM 2010 and India I hardly mentioned any mathematics. So here are a couple of mathematical snapshots from India. Not so much from the lectures themselves but … Continue reading

Posted in Conferences, Open problems | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Karim Adiprasito: Flag simplicial complexes and the non-revisiting path conjecture

This post is authored by Karim Adiprasito The past months have seen some exciting progress on diameter bounds for polytopes and polytopal complexes, both in the negative and in the positive direction.  Jesus de Loera and Steve Klee described simplicial polytopes which are not  … Continue reading

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The Quantum Debate is Over! (and other Updates)

Quid est noster computationis mundus? Nine months after is started, (much longer than expected,) and after eight posts on GLL, (much more than planned,)  and almost a thousand comments of overall good quality,   from quite a few participants, my … Continue reading

Posted in Combinatorics, Computer Science and Optimization, Controversies and debates, Updates | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Looking Again at Erdős’ Discrepancy Problem

Over Gowers’s blog Tim and I will make an attempt to revisit polymath5. Last Autumn I prepared three posts on the problems and we decided to launch them now. The first post is here. Here is a related MathOverflow question. … Continue reading

Posted in Combinatorics, Mathematics over the Internet, Open problems | 2 Comments

Tokyo, Kyoto, and Nagoya

Near Nagoya: Firework festival; Kyoto: with Gunter Ziegler; with Takayuki Hibi, Hibi, Marge Bayer, Curtis Green and Richard Stanly; Tokyo: Peter Frankl; crowded crossing I just returned from a trip to Japan to the FPSAC 2012 at Nagoya and a … Continue reading

Posted in Combinatorics, Conferences, Convex polytopes | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments