Intersecting families and, in particular, the Erdős-Ko-Rado theorem were a central part of my PhD thesis many years ago. Thus, I am always happy to come back to these type of problems. This post is to discuss my recent preprint on intersecting trees! It is in joint work with Péter Frankl, Glenn Hurlbert, Andrey Kupavskii, […]
This is the start of a new category on my blog called “Campus Life”. I will recategorize some of my older posts to it. What is the purpose of my blog? Originally, a grant proposal asked me how I communicate my research to a non-expert audience. Starting a blog seemed like a blog looked like […]
Earlier this year there was a conference in Budapest, Hungary, named Sum(m)it280, to honor the cumulative 280th birthday of the Péter Frankl, Zoltán Füredi, Ervin Győri and János Pach. There the organizers asked participants for survey articles for a conference volume on extremal problems in combinatorics and geometry. Now I have worked a reasonably amount […]
One of the greatest discovery of in the theory of distance-regular graphs has been the twisted Grassmann graph by Edwin van Dam and Jack Koolen. Here I want to describe a small variation of their construction for the twisted $ {D_{5,5}(q)}$ graph. This post mostly to preserve my blackboard on the topic. (I tend to […]
I have uploaded a preprint which concludes a joint work with John Bamberg and Ferdinand Ihringer that started last year during their visit to TU Delft. In this work, we have done one of my favorite things in mathematics research: combining unrelated topics to create something new in each of them. Here is a quick […]
A few days ago China celebrated one of many Chinese Valentine’s days: the 20th of May. Why is this a special day in China? Chinese has around 30 to 36 phonemes which is plenty, but Chinese phonotactics dictate that you can only make around 1200 syllables out of them, for instance, see this video. English […]
Last year Zhirayr Avetisyan and I created a math riddle about the games cops and robbers. It was part of an outreach event to high-school student at Ghent University. You can find it in this post here. The story was that a group of mathematicians wants to walk around the city of Ghent and have […]
The work of mathematicians goes through peer-review which contributes to the acceptance of the correctness of our work. Peer-reviewers are of course peers, that is other mathematicians, and most of us consider this work important. At least two of my colleagues complain about how much they have to referee and (they claim) give my name […]
