Category Archives: Sport

Test Your Intuition 53 by Ehud Friedgut: Which Way to Ride Your Bike

Posted on September 15, 2023 by Gil Kalai

This post was kindly written by Ehud Friedgut. Shana Tova (= Happy New Jewish Year) to all our readers. The following is a real-life question. I recently rode my bike around a closed track. The track consists of a flat … Continue reading →

Posted in Guest post, Sport, Test your intuition | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Mathematical news to cheer you up

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Gil Kalai

1.  Anna Kiesenhofer, a PhD mathematician researching PDEs at Ecole Polytechnique Federale Lausanne (EPFL), won the gold medal in the women’s bicycle road race at the Olympics. Here are two trivia question: a) Which hero of a recent post over … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Sport, Uncategorized, Updates | 5 Comments

Layish

Posted on September 27, 2017 by Gil Kalai

This story is implicitly referred to in the 2008 opening post of this blog. ———– It was high time to raise the level of the discussion, I thought. Princeton, Fall 1995. We were a group of mathematicians at the IAS … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Computer Science and Optimization, Games, Mathematics to the rescue, Philosophy, Rationality, Sport, Taxi-and-other-stories | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

Timothy Chow Launched Polymath12 on Rota Basis Conjecture and Other News

Posted on February 26, 2017 by Gil Kalai

Polymath12 Timothy Chow launched polymath12 devoted to the Rota Basis conjecture on the polymathblog. A classic paper on the subject is the 1989 paper by Rosa Huang and Gian Carlo-Rota. Let me mention a strong version of Rota’s conjecture (Conjecture … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Mathematics over the Internet, Movies, Music, Sport, Updates | Tagged | 1 Comment

Mathematical Gymnastics

Posted on August 15, 2014 by Gil Kalai

For the long days of ICM 2014 lectures, and long flights to and from Seoul, some mathematical gymnastics is needed. And this is precisely what Omer Angel taught us in his recent visit. Combining gymnastic with a demonstration of parallel … Continue reading →

Posted in Sport | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Another way to Revolutionize Football

Posted on June 9, 2011 by Gil Kalai

The angle of Victoria Beckham’s hat (here in a picture from a recent wedding) is closely related to our previous post on football One of the highlights of the recent Newton Institute  conference on discrete harmonic analysis was a football … Continue reading →

Posted in Games, Mathematics to the rescue, Sport | Tagged , | 9 Comments

The Intermediate Value Theorem Applied to Football

Posted on April 20, 2009 by Gil Kalai

My idea (in my teenage years) of how to become a professional basketball player was a bit desperate. To cover for my height and my athletic (dis)abilities, I would simply practice how to shoot perfectly from every corner of the … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics to the rescue, Sport, Taxi-and-other-stories | Tagged , , , , , | 20 Comments

A Deeper Look at Basketball

Posted on March 21, 2009 by Gil Kalai

This basketball is combinatorially equivalent to? Answer

Posted in Sport | Tagged | 18 Comments

1:0 to Italy: Michal Linial

Posted on December 10, 2008 by Gil Kalai

Coming back from Hinxton, the most exciting genome center in the world and the most boring place after 5pm… At 5:30, a shuttle bus takes all the ‘workers’ to the big city – to Cambridge. The shuttle bus dropped us … Continue reading →

Posted in Guest blogger, Sport, Taxi-and-other-stories | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments