Enjoying Idaho while ignoring IllinoisToday is the first day of my life that I am unemployed. And not by choice.As I mentioned on LinkedIn last week, me and about 160 of my colleagues, staff and faculty, untenured and tenured, lost our posi…
(Some of this came from a Reddit post I read, and some of the comments on it.) Here are theorems with names that I think are funny or unusual. The names are also pointers to the Wikipedia entry on them or some other source.The Chicken McNug…
I was watching a Jeopardy from 2004 (The Game Show Channel is rerunning Ken Jennings streak) and the following question raises a good question.The contestants where Ken, Jerry, Jennifer.In Double Jeopardy there was a category Biblical Name
Let's say there is a statement in math T that you wonder whether it's true or false. You may even make a conjecture of which way it goes. Do you have a rooting interest? I may think T is true, but if someone proves T or proves NOT(T) my mai…
Back in the 90s when I was a young professor at the University of Chicago, we would have a Complexity Class of the Week where I would take some interesting complexity class, write down on a white board everything we knew about it with some
Nutan Limaye and Thore Husfeldt guest post on the new deterministic parallel algorithm for bipartite perfect matching by Abhranil Chatterjee, Sumanta Ghosh, Rohit Gurjar, Roshan Raj and Thomas Thierauf.The post will try to explain three mai…
It could be related to another murder. Stash-keeper Muliya was killed, but the stash was not found: that is the prologue for the crime drama film by mathematician Roman Mikhaylov.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fairy_Tale_for_the_OldAnoth…
Herman Chernoff passed away on July 6, 5 days after turning 103. Ravi Boppana wrote a guest post about Chernoff's life for his 100th birthday. Let me talk about his most famous work, the Chernoff Bounds themselves. If you have a coin that w…
This is very much connected with the school of art criticism which says that you have to understand the act of creating go really understand the art. Also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Act_of_Creation
> I myself once learned 380 digits of π, when I was a crazy high-school kid. My never-attained ambition was to reach the spot, 762 digits out in the decimal expansion, where it goes "999999", so that I could recite it out loud, come to thos…
I think you meant "Euler-Mascheroni constant", after Lorenzo Mascheroni.The Euler-Maraschino constant presumably would be something about, maybe, the volume of a particular shape of cocktail glass? Or the proportion of ingredients? :)
The excellent graphic novelPrime Suspects: The Anatomy of Integers and Permutationsby Andrew Granville and Jennifer Granville, illustrated by Robert J Lewis,(I wrote a review of this graphic novel, for SIGACT News, here.)has an appendix, wh…