Monthly Archives: December 2020

The Argument Against Quantum Computers – A Very Short Introduction

Posted on December 29, 2020 by Gil Kalai

Left: Gowers’s book Mathematics a very short introduction. Right C. elegans; Boson Sampling can be seen as the C. elegans of quantum computing. (See, this paper.) Update (January 6, 2021): Tomorrow January, 7, 8:30 AM Israel time, I give a … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Computer Science and Optimization, Physics, Probability, Quantum | Tagged , | 12 Comments

Open problem session of HUJI-COMBSEM: Problem #4, Eitan Bachmat: Weighted Statistics for Permutations

Posted on December 26, 2020 by Gil Kalai

This is a continuation of our series of posts on the HUJI seminar 2020 open problems. This time the post was kindly written by Eitan Bachmat who proposed the problem.  My summary: understanding of the distribution of largest increasing subsequences … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Guest blogger, Probability | Tagged | 4 Comments

To Cheer You Up in Difficult Times 15: Yuansi Chen Achieved a Major Breakthrough on Bourgain’s Slicing Problem and the Kannan, Lovász and Simonovits Conjecture

Posted on December 21, 2020 by Gil Kalai

This post gives some background to  a recent amazing breakthrough  paper: An Almost Constant Lower Bound of the Isoperimetric Coefficient in the KLS Conjecture by Yuansi Chen. Congratulations Yuansi! The news Yuansi Chen gave an almost constant bounds for Bourgain’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Computer Science and Optimization, Convexity, Geometry | Tagged | 8 Comments

Open problem session of HUJI-COMBSEM: Problem #3, Ehud Friedgut – Independent sets and Lionel Levine’s infamous hat problem.

Posted on December 12, 2020 by Gil Kalai

Here are the two problems presented by Ehud Friedgut. The first arose by Friedgut, Kindler, and me in the context of studying  Lionel Levine’s infamous hat problem. The second is Lionel Levine’s infamous hat problem. Ehud Friedgut with a few … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Computer Science and Optimization, Probability | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Open problem session of HUJI-COMBSEM: Problem #2 Chaya Keller: The Krasnoselskii number

Posted on December 10, 2020 by Gil Kalai

  Marilyn Breen This is our second post on the open problem session of the HUJI combinatorics seminar. The video of the session is here. Today’s problem was presented by Chaya Keller. The Krasnoselskii number One of the best-known applications … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Convexity | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Photonic Huge Quantum Advantage ???

Posted on December 6, 2020 by Gil Kalai

This is a quick and preliminary post about a very recent announcement in a Science Magazine paper: Quantum computational advantage using photons by a group of researchers leaded by Jianwei Pan and Chao-Yang Lu. (Most of the researchers are from … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Physics, Probability, Quantum | Tagged , | 13 Comments