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Recent Posts
- To cheer you up in difficult times 21: Giles Gardam lecture and new result on Kaplansky’s conjectures
- Nostalgia corner: John Riordan’s referee report of my first paper
- At the Movies III: Picture a Scientist
- At the Movies II: Kobi Mizrahi’s short movie White Eye makes it to the Oscar’s short list.
- And the Oscar goes to: Meir Feder, Zvi Reznic, Guy Dorman, and Ron Yogev
- Thomas Vidick: What it is that we do
- To cheer you up in difficult times 20: Ben Green presents super-polynomial lower bounds for off-diagonal van der Waerden numbers W(3,k)
- To cheer you up in difficult times 19: Nati Linial and Adi Shraibman construct larger corner-free sets from better numbers-on-the-forehead protocols
- Possible future Polymath projects (2009, 2021)
Top Posts & Pages
- To Cheer You Up in Difficult Times 15: Yuansi Chen Achieved a Major Breakthrough on Bourgain's Slicing Problem and the Kannan, Lovász and Simonovits Conjecture
- To cheer you up in difficult times 21: Giles Gardam lecture and new result on Kaplansky's conjectures
- TYI 30: Expected number of Dice throws
- 8866128975287528³+(-8778405442862239)³+(-2736111468807040)³
- The Argument Against Quantum Computers - A Very Short Introduction
- Answer: Lord Kelvin, The Age of the Earth, and the Age of the Sun
- Amazing: Zhengfeng Ji, Anand Natarajan, Thomas Vidick, John Wright, and Henry Yuen proved that MIP* = RE and thus disproved Connes 1976 Embedding Conjecture, and provided a negative answer to Tsirelson's problem.
- Possible future Polymath projects (2009, 2021)
- Photonic Huge Quantum Advantage ???
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Category Archives: Taxi-and-other-stories
A small update from Israel and memories from Singapore: Partha Dasgupta, Robin Mason, Frank Ramsey, and 007
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 →
Fix a Horse Race…
GK (2019): Can you base world economy on horse races? Here is an old unpublished draft from 2008 that I did not complete, which was inspired by the economic crisis at that time. (It also felt a little over the … Continue reading →
Posted in Economics, Games, Rationality, Taxi-and-other-stories
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Tagged 2008 economic crisis, Bill Benter, Robert Aumann, Taxi-and-other-stories
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Layish
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 →
Which Street is More Important: Canner Street or Cold Spring Street
Is it possible that Cold Spring Street is as important as Canner Street? I knew Canner Street from my earlier visits to Yale but Cold Spring Street was new to me. Naturally, I assumed that Canner Street was the important … Continue reading →
Michal Linial: No Witches in Portugal
It gives me great pride to present: Michal Linial: March 2012 No witches in Portugal Landing in LISBOA, Portugal last night. I need to get to my hotel in Cascais. The nice lady in the tourist information ordered a … Continue reading →
Posted in Guest blogger, Taxi-and-other-stories
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Tagged Michal Linial, Portugal, Taxi-and-other-stories
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The Möbius Undershirt
“Look at this brand new undershirt,” my wife said. “I am shaking it and shaking it but still I have this twist. Can you see what to do?” I gave the undershirt a good shake. And another one. And one more. And … Continue reading →
Posted in Mathematics to the rescue, Taxi-and-other-stories
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Tagged Mobius srtip, Taxi-and-other-stories, Topology, Undershirts
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5 Comments
School Bus to Ramle
We had just come back to Israel from Palo Alto after spending a sabbatical year there and my child was starting school. I walked down with him to wait for the school bus. To my great surprise it was a yellow school … Continue reading →
A Little Story Regarding Borsuk’s Conjecture
Jeff Kahn Jeff and I worked on the problem for several years. Once he visited me with his family for two weeks. Before the visit I emailed him and asked: What should we work on in your visit? Jeff asnwered: … Continue reading →
Ulam and The Future of Mathematics
Ulam was scheduled to give a talk at the University of Chicago titled “The future of mathematics.” Stanislaw Ulam was a rather famous mathematician and a major player in building the H-bomb, so a large audience gathered.
The Intermediate Value Theorem Applied to Football
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 →