Monthly Archives: April 2009

The Generation Gap

  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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Blogging | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Exciting New Blogs and New Posts

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

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 in Blogging | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Coffee, Cigarettes, and Aggression

  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

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 , , , , | 15 Comments