Author Archives: Gil Kalai

Alef’s corner: Bicycles and the Art of Planar Random Maps

Posted on September 17, 2019

The artist behind Alef’s corner has a few mathematical designs and here are two new ones. (See Alef’s  website offering over 100 T-shirt designs.)   which was used for the official T-shirt for Jean-François Le Gall’s birthday conference. See also … Continue reading →

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

Paul Balister, Béla Bollobás, Robert Morris, Julian Sahasrabudhe, and Marius Tiba: Flat polynomials exist!

Posted on September 9, 2019

Béla Bollobás and Paul Erdős at the University of Cambridge in 1990. Credit George Csicsery (from the 1993 film “N is a Number”) (source) (I thank Gady Kozma for telling me about the result.) An old problem from analysis with a … Continue reading →

Posted in Analysis, Combinatorics | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Computer Science and its Impact on our Future

Posted on September 4, 2019

A couple weeks ago I told you about Avi Wigderson’s vision on the connections between the theory of computing and other areas of mathematics on the one hand and between computer science and other areas of science, technology and society … Continue reading →

Posted in Academics, Computer Science and Optimization, Quantum, Updates | Tagged | 1 Comment

Richard Ehrenborg’s problem on spanning trees in bipartite graphs

Posted on September 1, 2019

Richard Ehrenborg with a polyhedron In the Problem session last Thursday in Oberwolfach, Steve Klee presented a beautiful problem of Richard Ehrenborg regarding the number of spanning trees in bipartite graphs. Let be a bipartite graph with vertices on one … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Open problems | Tagged | 3 Comments

Mohammad Ghomi and Joel Spruck settled the Cartan-Hadamard conjecture!

Posted on August 28, 2019

Greetings from Oberwolfach from a great conference on algebraic, geometric, and topological combinatorics. Stay tuned for more pictures and updates from Oberwolfach and CERN, and also in case you did not see it already here is the link to the … Continue reading →

Posted in Geometry, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Amazing: Ryan Alweiss, Shachar Lovett, Kewen Wu, Jiapeng Zhang made dramatic progress on the Sunflower Conjecture

Posted on August 23, 2019

WOW! The new paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.08483 improved bounds for the sunflower lemma gives the most dramatic progress on the sunflower conjecture since it was asked. Congratulations to Ryan Alweiss, Shachar Lovett, Kewen Wu, Jiapeng Zhang. (Written on my smartphone will expand … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Uncategorized | 4 Comments

The Argument against Quantum Computers – a CERN Colloquium and a New Paper

Posted on August 21, 2019

Let me announce my CERN colloquium this Thursday, August 22, 2019, 16:30-17:30 entitled “The argument against quantum computers.” If you are at CERN or the neighborhood, please please come to the lecture. (Tea and coffee will be served at 16:00. … Continue reading →

Posted in Computer Science and Optimization, Physics, Quantum | Tagged , | 6 Comments

Equiangular lines with a fixed angle and other breakthroughs from Yufei Zhao’s blog

Posted on August 19, 2019

Today I would like to report about some breakthroughs in the area of combinatorics, and about blog posts in Yufei Zhao’s blog that describe these remarkable results (better than I can). Many of the coauthors in these breakthroughs are undergraduate … Continue reading →

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

Two Important Quantum Announcements!

Posted on August 9, 2019

I am very happy to announce two quantum events. First, I would like to announce a course “Computation, quantization, symplectic geometry, and information” in the first 2019/2020 semester  at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI). The course will by on … Continue reading →

Posted in Computer Science and Optimization, Conferences, Quantum, Teaching | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

Avi Wigderson’s: “Integrating computational modeling, algorithms, and complexity into theories of nature, marks a new scientific revolution!” (An invitation for a discussion.)

Posted on August 4, 2019

  The cover of Avi Wigderson’s book “Mathematics and computation” as was first exposed to the public in Avi’s Knuth Prize videotaped lecture. (I had trouble with 3 of the words: What is EGDE L WONK 0?  what is GCAAG?GTAACTC … Continue reading →

Posted in Academics, Combinatorics, Computer Science and Optimization, Open discussion, Philosophy, What is Mathematics | Tagged | 15 Comments