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 […]
This week I put two new preprint on the arXiv. Both are on a similar theme, so I will discuss them together. One is with Morgan Rodgers on regular sets of lines in rank 3 polar spaces. The other one is solves a problem which I have been thinking about very regularly since November 2017: […]
This is not a proper “I have jobs! Please apply!” post, but more a general service announcement. It is my understanding that I can essentially have up to two post-docs here at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in Shenzhen without having to worry about funding too much. Shenzhen is one of the […]
Apparently, I described a very elegant argument to give a lower bound on the second largest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix of a regular graph last year. This was pointed out in two recent preprints by Eero Räty, Benny Sudakov, and Istvan Tomon. This blog post is to describe the very short argument and how […]
Let me start with a small service announcement. In November I am taking up a position as an tenure-track assistant at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen. At least if everything goes well. Airplanes can crash or I could fail the medical examination. The date of my flight is easy to remember. […]
Yesterday I received the feedback by referees on one of my grant proposals. Two of the three referee reports were very positive, but, sadly, one was just positive. Hence, I did not receive the highest grade in the evaluation system of the grant agency, only the second highest (that particular grant agency has 7 grades). […]
I am very happy about today’s result by Sam Mattheus and Jacques Verstraete proving an almost tight bound on the off-diagonal Ramsey number r(4, t). This beats the bound by Bohman and Keevash using the random process. See Anurag’s post above for details. Just yesterday I gave a plenary talk at CanaDAM about off-diagonal Ramsey […]
All (most) math departments have a day where school students come to the department and you do math-y activities with them. In Ghent this day is called UniMath and happened today. My colleague Zhirayr Avetisyan and I contributed a riddle to it. Maybe it was a bit too hard, but I like what we ended […]