Monthly Archives: April 2009

The Generation Gap

Posted on April 26, 2009 by Gil Kalai

  Which is larger, the generation gap between you and your perents or the generation gap between you and your children?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 3 Comments

A Problem on Planar Percolation

Posted on April 25, 2009 by Gil Kalai

Conjecture (Gady Kozma):  Prove that the critical probability for planar percolation on a Cayley graph of the group is always an algebraic number. Gady  mentioned this conjecture in his talk here about percolation on infinite Cayley graphs.  (Update April 30: Today Gady mentioned … Continue reading →

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

A Conference and a School on Oded Schramm’s Mathematics

Posted on April 21, 2009 by Gil Kalai

There will be a conference this summer in Redmond and a school in December in Jerusalem devoted to Oded Schramm’s mathematics.   Oded Schramm Memorial Conference Probability and Geometry Redmond WA, August 30-31, 2009       To be held at Microsoft … Continue reading →

Posted in Conferences, Probability | Tagged | 6 Comments

The Intermediate Value Theorem Applied to Football

Posted on April 20, 2009 by Gil Kalai

My idea (in my teenage years) of how to become a professional basketball player was a bit desperate. To cover for my height and my athletic (dis)abilities, I would simply practice how to shoot perfectly from every corner of the … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics to the rescue, Sport, Taxi-and-other-stories | Tagged , , , , , | 20 Comments

Two Fractal Vegtables Found on Blogs

Posted on April 16, 2009 by Gil Kalai

Physicists and mathematicians think alike:  From Kowalski’s blog From asymptotia

Posted in Blogging | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Exciting New Blogs and New Posts

Posted on April 12, 2009 by Gil Kalai

There are new exciting blogs and all sort of nice things on old blogs. In Avzel’s journal you can find a post with the words and a link to the performence of a beautiful Leonard Cohen’s song “everybody knows”;  and you can … Continue reading →

Posted in Blogging | Tagged | 4 Comments

(Eran Nevo) The g-Conjecture II: The Commutative Algebra Connection

Posted on April 9, 2009 by Gil Kalai

Richard Stanley This post is authored by Eran Nevo. (It is the second in a series of five posts.) The g-conjecture: the commutative algebra connection Let be a triangulation of a -dimensional sphere. Stanley’s idea was to associate with a ring … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Convex polytopes, Open problems | Tagged , , , , , | 9 Comments

Jerusalem Tour

Posted on April 8, 2009 by Gil Kalai
Posted in Blogging | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Coffee, Cigarettes, and Aggression

Posted on April 7, 2009 by Gil Kalai

  Upgrade to hell Getting an upgrade to business class on a flight to Amsterdam en route to NYC seemed splendid. But I soon discovered that I was upgraded to one of the two rows for business smokers. The person on … Continue reading →

Posted in Taxi-and-other-stories | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

How the g-Conjecture Came About

Posted on April 4, 2009 by Gil Kalai

Update: Slides from a great 2014 lecture on the g-conjecture by Lou Billera in the conference celebrating Richard Stanley’s 70th birthday. This post complements Eran Nevo’s first  post on the -conjecture 1) Euler’s theorem Euler Euler’s famous formula for the … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Convex polytopes, Open problems | Tagged , , , , | 14 Comments