Author Archives: Gil Kalai

Alef Corner: ICM2022

Posted on May 6, 2021 by Gil Kalai

Alef’s new piece for ICM 2022 will surely cheer you up!

Posted in Art, Combinatorics, Geometry, ICM2022 | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The probabilistic proof that 2^400-593 is a prime: a revolutionary new type of mathematical proof, or not a proof at all?

Posted on April 22, 2021 by Gil Kalai

Avi Wigderson gave a great CS colloquium talk at HUJI on Monday (a real auditorium talk with an audience of about 200 people). The title of the talk was The Value of Errors in Proofs – a fascinating journey from … Continue reading →

Posted in Computer Science and Optimization, Controversies, Philosophy, What is Mathematics | Tagged , , | 9 Comments

With Avi at Suzanna

Posted on April 21, 2021 by Gil Kalai

To cheer you up even further a new story that breaks new ground about Avi Wigderson and me (and Laci Lovasz) and a couple more famous Isrealis. For another story about Avi and me see Layish. (I told both stories … Continue reading →

Posted in Taxi-and-other-stories | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Meeting Michael H. at Rio

Posted on April 16, 2021 by Gil Kalai

After many years, to cheer you up in these difficult times, another story in our corner “taxi and other stories”.  Meeting Michael H. at Rio In my early years I used to guess how people looked by their names. I … Continue reading →

Posted in Taxi-and-other-stories, What is Mathematics | Tagged | 1 Comment

What is mathematics (or at least, how it feels)

Posted on March 28, 2021 by Gil Kalai

(I suppose that this amazing picture can serve as a metaphor also for life, for science, for human rights, for happiness and for a variety of other things.) Picture: AFP Suez Canal: the Ever Green ship blockage.

Posted in What is Mathematics | Tagged | 2 Comments

Alef’s Corner

Posted on March 26, 2021 by Gil Kalai

After Picasso 1955. Happy Passover to all our readers. More from Alef’s corner

Posted in Art, personal | Tagged | 3 Comments

To cheer you up in difficult times 22: some mathematical news! (Part 1)

Posted on March 23, 2021 by Gil Kalai

To cheer you up, in these difficult times, here are (in two parts) some mathematical news that I heard in personal communications or on social media. (Maybe I will write later, in more details,  about few of them that are … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Convex polytopes, Convexity, Geometry | Leave a comment

Cheerful News in Difficult Times: The Abel Prize is Awarded to László Lovász and Avi Wigderson

Posted on March 17, 2021 by Gil Kalai

The Abel Prize was awarded earlier today to László Lovász and Avi Wigderson “for their foundational contributions to theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics, and their leading role in shaping them into central fields of modern mathematics.” Congratulations to Laci … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Computer Science and Optimization, Convexity, Geometry, Updates | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Amazing: Feng Pan and Pan Zhang Announced a Way to “Spoof” (Classically Simulate) the Google’s Quantum Supremacy Circuit!

Posted on March 10, 2021 by Gil Kalai

Feng Pan and Pan Zhang uploaded a new paper on the arXive  “Simulating the Sycamore supremacy circuits.” with an amazing announcement. Abstract: We propose a general tensor network method for simulating quantum circuits. The method is massively more efficient in … Continue reading →

Posted in Computer Science and Optimization, Physics, Quantum | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

To cheer you up in difficult times 21: Giles Gardam lecture and new result on Kaplansky’s conjectures

Posted on February 25, 2021 by Gil Kalai

There is a very famous conjecture of Irving Kaplansky that asserts that the group ring of a torsion free group does not have zero-divisors. Given a group G and a ring R, the group ring R[G] consists of formal (finite) … Continue reading →

Posted in Algebra | Tagged , | 7 Comments