Category Archives: Probability

Exciting Beginning-of-the-Year Activities and Seminars.

Posted on October 30, 2018 by

Let me mention two talks with very promising news by friends of the blog, Karim Adiprasito and Noam Lifshitz. As always, with the beginning of the academic year there are a lot of exciting activities,  things are rather hectic around,  … Continue reading →

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

Duncan Dauvergne and Bálint Virág Settled the Random Sorting Networks Conjectures

Posted on May 20, 2018 by

A short summary: The beautiful decade-old conjectures on random sorting networks by  Omer Angel, Alexander Holroyd, Dan Romik, and Bálint Virág, have now been settled by Duncan Dauvergne and Bálint Virág in two papers: Circular support in random sorting networks, by Dauvergne … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Probability, Updates | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Itai Benjamini: Coarse Uniformization and Percolation & A Paper by Itai and me in Honor of Lucio Russo

Posted on November 16, 2017 by

Here is another video of a smashing short talk by my dear friend Itai Benjamini with beautiful conjectures proposing an important new step in the connection between percolation and conformal geometry. Here is the link to Itai’s original paper Percolation … Continue reading →

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Bálint Virág: Random matrices for Russ

Posted on November 2, 2017 by

You can watch now all the videos for Russfest Elegance in Probability. Many great talks! I just watched Bálint Virág‘s lecture “Random matrices for Russ”. Highly recommended.

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TYI 31 – Rados Radoicic’s Rope Problem

Posted on October 4, 2017 by

  Ropemaker (source) Rados Radoicic wrote me: “Several years back, I heard the following puzzle that turns out to be rather ‘classical’: “There are N ropes in a bag. In each step, two rope ends are picked uniformly at random, tied … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Probability, Test your intuition | Tagged , | 7 Comments

Elchanan Mossel’s Amazing Dice Paradox (your answers to TYI 30)

Posted on September 8, 2017 by

TYI 30 asked Elchanan Mossel’s Amazing Dice Paradox (that I heard from Yuval Peres yesterday) You throw a die until you get 6. What is the expected number of throws (including the throw giving 6) conditioned on the event that all throws … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Probability, Test your intuition | Tagged , | 63 Comments

TYI 30: Expected number of Dice throws

Posted on September 7, 2017 by

Test your intuition: You throw a dice until you get 6. What is the expected number of throws (including the throw giving 6) conditioned on the event that all throws gave even numbers. follow-up post

Posted in Combinatorics, Probability, Test your intuition | Tagged | 38 Comments

Test your intuition 29: Diameter of various random trees

Posted on September 5, 2017 by

Both trees in general and random trees in particular are wonderful objects. And there is nothing more appropriate to celebrate Russ Lyons great birthday conference “Elegance in Probability” (taking place now in Tel Aviv) than to test your intuition, dear … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Probability, Test your intuition | Tagged , | 19 Comments

Boolean Functions: Influence, Threshold, and Noise

Posted on January 24, 2017 by

Here is the written version of my address at the 7ECM last July in Berlin. Boolean functions, Influence, threshold, and Noise Trying to follow an example of a 1925 lecture by Landau (mentioned in the lecture), the writing style is very … Continue reading →

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

The US Elections and Nate Silver: Informtion Aggregation, Noise Sensitivity, HEX, and Quantum Elections.

Posted on October 22, 2016 by

Being again near general  elections is  an opportunity to look at some topics we talked about over the years. I am quite fond of (and a bit addicted to) Nate Silver’s site FiveThirtyEight. Silver’s models tell us what is the probability that … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Computer Science and Optimization, Probability, Quantum | Tagged , , | 14 Comments