Author Archives: Gil Kalai

To cheer you up in difficult times 6: Play Rani Sharim’s two-player games of life, read Maya Bar-Hillel presentation on catching lies with statistics, and more.

Posted on June 26, 2020

Sorry for the long blog silence. In this post I wish to give a few links each of which probably deserves a full post. I will start with Rani Sharim’s two-player variants of John Conway’s game-of-life Here is a web-page … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Games, Rationality | Tagged , | Leave a comment

To cheer you up in difficult times 5: A New Elementary Proof of the Prime Number Theorem by Florian K. Richter

Posted on May 30, 2020

Here is a piece of news that will certainly cheer you up: Florian Richter found A new elementary proof of the prime number theorem. (I thank Tami Ziegler for telling me about the new result.) From left to right: Atle Selberg, … Continue reading →

Posted in Number theory, Updates | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

To cheer you up in difficult times 4: Women In Theory present — I will survive

Posted on May 11, 2020

An amazing video (Update, May18 2020). I failed to explain what WIT is and this may have caused some misunderstanding. Here is a description from the Simons Institute site. “The Women in Theory (WIT) Workshop is intended for graduate and … Continue reading →

Posted in Academics, Combinatorics, Computer Science and Optimization, Convexity, Games, Philosophy, Poetry, What is Mathematics, Women in science | 14 Comments

To cheer you up in difficult times 3: A guest post by Noam Lifshitz on the new hypercontractivity inequality of Peter Keevash, Noam Lifshitz, Eoin Long and Dor Minzer

Posted on May 8, 2020

This is a guest post kindly contributed by Noam Lifshitz. My short introduction: There is nothing like a new hypercontractivity inequality to cheer you up in difficult times and this post describes an amazing new hypercontractivity inequality.  The post describes … Continue reading →

Posted in Analysis, Combinatorics, Computer Science and Optimization, Guest post, Poetry, Probability | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Harsanyi’s Sweater

Posted on April 21, 2020

Today is the Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel.  Here is a moving story from the  paper  about  John Harsanyi,  Harsanyi’s Sweater, by Robert J. Aumann. It is 1944 in Budapest, and John is in his early twenties. He has been … Continue reading →

Posted in Games, Teaching | Tagged , | Leave a comment

To cheer you up in difficult times II: Mysterious matching news by Gal Beniamini, Naom Nisan, Vijay Vazirani and Thorben Tröbst!

Posted on April 19, 2020

Matching is one of the richest gold mines for ideas and results in mathematics, computer science and other areas.  Today I want to briefly tell you about a curious, surprising, mysterious, and cheerful recent result by Gal Beniamini and Noam … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Computer Science and Optimization | Tagged , , , | 10 Comments

Trees not Cubes! Memories of Boris Tsirelson

Posted on April 3, 2020

This post is devoted to a few memories of Boris Tsirelson who passed away at the end of January. I would like to mention that a few days ago graph theorist Robin Thomas passed away after long battle with ALS. … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Obituary, Probability, Quantum | Tagged | 3 Comments

A small update from Israel and memories from Singapore: Partha Dasgupta, Robin Mason, Frank Ramsey, and 007

Posted on April 1, 2020

A small update about the situation here in Israel Eight weeks ago I wrote that my heart goes out to the people of Wuhan and China, and these days my heart goes out to people in Italy, Spain, the US, … Continue reading →

Posted in Algebra, Combinatorics, Conferences, Economics, Taxi-and-other-stories, Updates | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Game Theory – on-line Course at IDC, Herzliya

Posted on March 29, 2020

Game theory, a graduate course at IDC, Herzliya; Lecturer: Gil Kalai; TA: Einat Wigderson,  ZOOM mentor: Ethan. Starting Tuesday March 31, I am giving an on-line course (in Hebrew) on Game theory at IDC, Herzliya (IDC English site; IDC Chinese … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Computer Science and Optimization, Economics, Games, Rationality, Teaching | Tagged , | 2 Comments

TYI44: “What Then, To Raise an Old Question, is Mathematics?”

Posted on March 26, 2020

“The argument is carried out not in mathematical symbols but in ordinary English, there is no obscure or technical terms. Knowledge of calculus is not presupposed. In fact, one hardly need to know how to count. Yet any mathematician will … Continue reading →

Posted in Test your intuition, What is Mathematics | Tagged , | 14 Comments