Love in Projective Planes, Chinese Valentine’s Day & Phonotactics
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 […]
Students and Robots
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 […]
Refereeing
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 […]
Post-Doc Positions at SUSTech, Shenzhen
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 […]
Move to China & Blog Picture & Data Storage
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. […]
Bielefeld Buildings Conspiracy
The 28th edition of the Buildings conference is held in Ghent (where I am currently based) this September. [Note that this is unrelated to the actually buildings which you live and work in. The mathematical branch of building theory is abstract algebra. I have one post mentioning them.] Now I am not in the habit […]