Monthly Archives: March 2009

An Open Discussion and Polls: Around Roth’s Theorem

Suppose that  is a subset of of maximum cardinality not containing an arithmetic progression of length 3. Let . How does behave? We do not really know. Will it help talking about it? Can we somehow look beyond the horizon and try to guess what … Continue reading

Posted in Combinatorics, Open discussion, Open problems | Tagged , , , | 30 Comments

A Proposal Regarding Gilad Shalit

Since an agreement for the release of Gilad Shalit in exchange for the release of Hamas prisoners could not be reached, I propose to initiate negotiations (perhaps with Egyptian help) on the improvement of Gilad Shalit’s captivity conditions. In return … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 9 Comments

A Deeper Look at Basketball

This basketball is combinatorially equivalent to? Answer

Posted in Sport | Tagged | 18 Comments

Colorful Caratheodory Revisited

  Janos Pach wrote me:   “I saw that you several times returned to the colored Caratheodory and Helly theorems and related stuff, so I thought that you may be interested in the enclosed paper by Holmsen, Tverberg and me, in … Continue reading

Posted in Convexity | Tagged | 2 Comments

A Beautiful Garden of Hypertrees

We had a series of posts (1,2,3,4) “from Helly to Cayley” on weighted enumeration of Q-acyclic simplicial complexes. The simplest case beyond  Cayley’s theorem were Q-acyclic complexes  with vertices, edges, and triangles. One example is the six-vertex triangulation of the … Continue reading

Posted in Combinatorics | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Extremal Combinatorics on Permutations

We talked about extremal problems for set systems: collections of subsets of an element sets, – Sperner’s theorem, the Erdos-Ko-Rado theorem, and quite a few more. (See here, here and here.) What happens when we consider collections of permutations rather than … Continue reading

Posted in Combinatorics | Tagged , , , , , | 9 Comments

Polymath1: Success!

“polymath” based on internet image search And here is a link to the current draft of the paper. Update:  March 26, the name of the post originally entitled “Polymath1: Probable Success!” was now updated to “Polymath1: Success!” It is now becoming … Continue reading

Posted in Blogging, Combinatorics, What is Mathematics | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

Do Politicians Act Rationally?

Well, I wrote an article (in Hebrew) about it in the Newspaper Haaretz. An English translation appeared in the English edition. Here is an appetizer: During World War II, many fighter planes returned from bombing missions in Japan full of bullet holes. The … Continue reading

Posted in Games, Rationality | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Noise Sensitivity Lecture and Tales

  A lecture about Noise sensitivity Several of my recent research projects are related to noise, and noise was also a topic of a recent somewhat philosophical post.   My oldest and perhaps most respectable noise-related project was the work with Itai Benjamini and Oded … Continue reading

Posted in Combinatorics, Computer Science and Optimization, Probability | Tagged , , , , , , | 14 Comments

The Mystery Beeping Riddle

    We came back from the airport with our daughter who has just landed after a four-month trip to India. The car was making a strange beep every so often. Maybe it is an indicator signal that should have … Continue reading

Posted in Mathematics to the rescue, Rationality, Riddles | 12 Comments