Category Archives: Combinatorics

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 by

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 4: Women In Theory present — I will survive

Posted on May 11, 2020 by

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 by

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

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 by

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 by

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 by

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 by

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

Kelman, Kindler, Lifshitz, Minzer, and Safra: Towards the Entropy-Influence Conjecture

Posted on March 22, 2020 by

Let me briefly report on a remarkable new paper by Esty Kelman, Guy Kindler, Noam Lifshitz, Dor Minzer, and Muli Safra, Revisiting Bourgain-Kalai and Fourier Entropies. The paper describes substantial progress towards the Entropy-Influence conjecture, posed by Ehud Friedgut and … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Computer Science and Optimization, Open problems | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Or Ordentlich, Oded Regev and Barak Weiss: New bounds for Covering Density!

Posted on March 18, 2020 by

Update (June 3, 2020): The paper New bounds on the density of lattice coverings is now on the arXiv. Barak Weiss lectured about his breakthrough results with Or Ordentlich, and Oded Regev, at a Simons Institute workshop: Lattices: Geometry, Algorithms and … Continue reading →

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

To cheer you up in complicated times – A book proof by Rom Pinchasi and Alexandr Polyanskii for a 1978 Conjecture by Erdős and Purdy!

Posted on March 14, 2020 by

Things do not look that good, and these are difficult times. But here on the blog we have plenty of things to cheer you up and assure you. And today we point to two book proofs — two book proofs … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Geometry, What is Mathematics | Tagged , | 8 Comments