Poll: Grants & Attributions in Mathematics
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). […]
Finite Geometry Beats the Random Process
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 […]
Mathematicians & Bureaucrats
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 […]
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 […]
Collecting Strongly Regular Graphs
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 […]
A Boolean Function with Small Degree and Many Variables
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 […]
German Elections! What do the parties say about ̶m̶̶̶a̶̶̶t̶̶̶h̶̶̶?̶ quantum?
Germany votes for a new parliament on the 26th of September 2021, so only in a few weeks from now. What do the German parties say about math in their election platforms? Not much, but they talk much about math-related topics such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. So let us have a look! Actually, […]
The History of Hoffman’s (Ratio) Bound
Hoffman’s bound (or: ratio bound) on the size of a coclique (or: independent set, stable set) in a graph is one of the most important bounds in spectral graph theory. At the same time it is often misattributed. Primary reason for is that Hoffman never published it, but people want to cite something for it. […]