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 […]
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: […]
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 […]
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 […]
Today I write about a recent hobby of mine: Collecting strongly regular graphs. It started three years ago. You can find my collection on my homepage. I collect many SRGs with known parameters. It started here. This is about size, not quantity, and tries to give an idea how a typical SRG with certain parameters […]
Recently, while working on a research project, I got on a tangent. From this tangent, I got on another tangent and that is what I want to write about today: a very nice Boolean function. This example got rediscovered several times for different reasons and, as I try to emphasize from time, I believe that […]