Monthly Archives: August 2020

To cheer you up in difficult times 11: Immortal Songs by Sabine Hossenfelder and by Tom Lehrer

Posted on August 29, 2020 by Gil Kalai

Enjoy! To cheer you up in difficult times here are songs by Sabine Hossenfelder and by Tom Lehrer. I like the music and lyrics and the unusual combination of science, humor and satire. Sabine Hossenfelder : Outer space* Tom Lehrer: … Continue reading →

Posted in Music, Physics, Poetry, What is Mathematics, Women in science | Tagged , | 3 Comments

To cheer you up in difficult times 10: Noam Elkies’ Piano Improvisations and more

Posted on August 27, 2020 by Gil Kalai

For the previous post “quantum matters” click here. Noam D. Elkies piano improvisations Every day since March 27, 2020 Noam Elkies (Noam’s home page) uploaded a new piece of piano improvisation. The Hebrew title of his page is “Music will … Continue reading →

Posted in Games, Music, Number theory | Tagged | Leave a comment

Quantum Matters

Posted on August 22, 2020 by Gil Kalai

A comparison between the Google estimator U for the fidelity and two improved estimators that we studied  MLE (maximum likelihood estimator) and V (a variant of U). (More figures at the end of the post.) Here are some links on … Continue reading →

Posted in Quantum, Statistics | Tagged , | 6 Comments

To cheer you up in difficult times 9: Alexey Pokrovskiy proved that Rota’s Basis Conjecture holds asymptotically

Posted on August 14, 2020 by Gil Kalai

Pokrovskiy’s startling morning  rainbow Rota’s Basis Conjecture holds asymptotically, by Alexey Pokrovskiy Abstract: Rota’s Basis Conjecture is a well known problem from matroid theory, that states that for any collection of n bases in a rank n matroid, it is … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Updates | Tagged , , | 15 Comments

To Cheer you up in Difficult Times 8: Nathan Keller and Ohad Klein Proved Tomaszewski’s Conjecture on Randomly Signed Sums

Posted on August 1, 2020 by Gil Kalai

Today we talk about the paper, Proof of Tomaszewski’s Conjecture on Randomly Signed Sums, by Nathan Keller and Ohad Klein. Consider a unit vector That is . Consider all () signed sums where each is either 1 or -1. Theorem … Continue reading →

Posted in Analysis, Combinatorics, Probability | Tagged , , | 12 Comments