tingilinde

graphing fun

a simple intro to planar graphs

and moving on to perfect graphs

grad student solves a problem on the board and gets phd

There's a tale about the math grad student who sees a problem on the blackboard and, thinking it was a homework problem, goes off and solves it getting a Ph.D. as a reward.  It turns out there's some truth in the story..  this interview with George Dantzig.

snip

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MP: How did it happen that you did your Ph.D. on a statistical topic w you took so few courses in statistics?

Dantzig: It happened because during my first year at Berkeley I arrived lat day at one of Neyman's classes. On the blackboard there were two problems assumed had been assigned for homework. I copied them down. A few days l apologized to Neyman for taking so long to do the homework?the pro seemed to be a little harder to do than usual. I asked him if he still wanted it. He told me to throw it on his desk. I did so reluctantly because his desk was covered with such a heap of papers that I feared my homework would be lost there forever. About six weeks later, one Sunday morning about eight o'clock, Anne and I were awakened by someone banging on our front door. It was Neyman. He rushed in with papers in hand, all excited: "I've just written an introduction to one of your papers. Read it so I can send it out right away for publication." For a minute I had no idea what he was talking about. To make a long story short, the problems on the blackboard that I had solved thinking they were homework were in fact two famous unsolved problems in statistics. That was the first inkling I had that there was anything special about them.

MP: But you had apologized to Neyman for taking so long to do them.

Dantzig: Well, there was no particular deadline, and you know how graduate students take their time. A year later, when I began to worry about a thesis topic, Neyman just shrugged and told me to wrap the two problems in a binder and he would accept them as my thesis. The second of the two problems, however, was not published until after World War II. It happened this way. Around 1950 I received a letter from Abraham Wald enclosing the final galley proofs of a paper of his about to go to press in the Annals of Mathematical Statistics. Someone had just pointed out to him that the main result in his paper was the same as the second "homework" problem solved in my thesis. I wrote back suggesting that we publish jointly. He simply inserted my name as coauthor into the galley proof.

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a tip of the hat to Andrew

 

big numbers

stupid big numbers

 

chalkboards

The chalkboards of mathematicians 

a tip of the hat to Mike

 

42 falls!

Douglas would be happy..  all numbers up to 100 can be represented as the sum of three integer cubes

 

the history of computer

Katherine Johnson is 101 today

 

a non-technical discussion of new crypto techniques to counter the rise of quantum computing attacks

Viable quantum computing attacks on cryptography are still in the future, but people realize it's coming and are working on counter measures.  A nice non-technical piece in Science. 

snip

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A full-fledged quantum computer is still years, if not decades, away. But developers have long thought that its killer app will be decoding encrypted messages on the internet and elsewhere, be they state secrets or personal information. That prospect has galvanized cryptographers. At a meeting this week in Santa Barbara, California, they will discuss nearly two dozen schemes for encrypting messages in ways that even quantum computers cannot crack.

The workshop is part of a push by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to set standards for so-called postquantum cryptography. The multiyear effort may sound premature and a bit paranoid, as such a quantum computer may never exist. But cryptographers say now is the time to prepare, especially because anybody could record sensitive communications now and decipher them later. “If you wait until we have a quantum computer it’s too late,” says Tanja Lange, a cryptographer at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. “Every day that we don’t have postquantum cryptography is a day the data is leaked.”

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a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

638 and flying straight

Some math fun with Neil Sloane - the OEIS is here.

 

good gosh

The sensitivity conjecture has been proven and the proof is simple. 

Probably for math and CS types, but something people thought difficult has a shockingly simple proof.  Quanta has a piece on it  It was even summarized in a tweet (if the tweet doesn't make sense ignore this one.  You need a bit of background that's probably obscure to most)

 

 

 

poppy northcott

A short tweet storm on mathematical member of the technical staff Poppy Northcott.

part of Apollo