Tag Archives: Tim Gowers

Possible future Polymath projects (2009, 2021)

What will be our next polymath project? A polymath project (Wikipedia) is a collaboration among mathematicians to solve important and difficult mathematical problems by coordinating many mathematicians to communicate with each other on finding the best route to the solution. … Continue reading

Posted in Combinatorics, Mathematics over the Internet, Open discussion | Tagged , , | 32 Comments

This question from Tim Gowers will certainly cheeer you up! and test your intuition as well!

I've rolled a die and not looked at it yet. The statement, "If the number I rolled equals 2+2 then it equals 5," is … — Timothy Gowers (@wtgowers) October 18, 2020 Here is a tweet from Tim Gowers  It … Continue reading

Posted in Logic and set theory, Philosophy, Probability | Tagged | 12 Comments

The Brown-Erdős-Sós 1973 Conjecture

Greetings from Oberwolfach.  This week, there is a great meeting here on combinatorics. In this post I want to state the Brown-Erdős-Sós conjecture and one of its variants. The trigger was a beautiful talk I heard from Lior Gishboliner on … Continue reading

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

News (mainly polymath related)

Update (Jan 21) j) Polymath11 (?) Tim Gowers’s proposed a polymath project on Frankl’s conjecture. If it will get off the ground we will have (with polymath10) two projects running in parallel which is very nice. (In the comments Jon Awbrey gave … Continue reading

Posted in Combinatorics, Conferences, Mathematics over the Internet, Polymath10, Polymath3, Updates | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

Why is Mathematics Possible: Tim Gowers’s Take on the Matter

In a previous post I mentioned the question of why is mathematics possible. Among the interesting comments to the post, here is a comment by Tim Gowers: “Maybe the following would be a way of rephrasing your question. We know … Continue reading

Posted in Open discussion, Philosophy, What is Mathematics | Tagged , , , | 22 Comments

Mittag-Leffler Institute and Yale, Winter 2005; Test your intuition: Who Played the Piano?

This is a little “flashback” intermission in my posts about my debate with Aram Harrow. This time I try to refer to Cris Moore’s question regarding  the motivation for my study. For the readers it gives an opportunity to win a … Continue reading

Posted in Computer Science and Optimization, Controversies and debates, Physics, Test your intuition | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

Knighted for Services to Mathematics

The Birthday and Diamond Jubilee Honours 2012 was released on 16 June 2012 in the United Kingdom and Tim Gowers was knighted for “services to mathematics”! So I suppose Tim is now becoming “Sir William.” It is possible that the Queen mainly … Continue reading

Posted in Updates | Tagged | 3 Comments

The Internet, Journals and all that.

Tim Gowers wrote an interesting post where he proposed in surprising many details an Internet mechanism (mixing ingredients from the arXive, blogs, MathOverflow and polymath projects) to replace Journals. Noam Nisan (who advocated similar changes over the years) wrote an interesting related … Continue reading

Posted in Academics, Mathematics over the Internet | Tagged , | 4 Comments

False Beliefs in Mathematics

Test your intuition: For two n by n matrices A and B, is it always the case that tr(ABAB) = tr(ABBA)?

Posted in Mathematics over the Internet, Test your intuition | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Polymath Reflections

Polymath is a collective open way of doing mathematics. It  started over Gowers’s blog with the polymath1 project that was devoted to the Density Hales Jewett problem. Since then we  had Polymath2 related to Tsirelson spaces in Banach space theory , an  intensive Polymath4 devoted … Continue reading

Posted in Mathematics over the Internet, Open discussion | Tagged , | 4 Comments