nklein software

OK, this will be my last blog post hawking Quantum Computing Since Democritus, at least for a while. But I do have four pieces of exciting news about the book that I want to share. Amazon is finally listing the print version of QCSD as available for shipment in North America, slightly ahead of schedule! Amazon’s price is $35.27. Cambridge University Press has very generously offered readers of Shtetl-Optimized a 20% discount off their list price—meaning $31.99 instead of $39.99—if you click this link to order directly from them. Note that CUP has a shipping charge of $6.50. So ordering ... [Link]

This post is based on a comment by Oz to our question about balls with two colors: “There is an interesting and more difficult variation I once heard but can’t recall where: You have a box with n red balls and n blue balls. You take out each time a ball at random as before. But, if the ball was red, you put it back in the box and take out a blue ball. If the ball was blue, you put it back in the box and take out a red ball. You keep as before until left only with ... [Link]

You have a box with n red balls and n blue balls. You take out balls one by one at random until left only with balls of the same color. How many balls will be left as a function of n ? 1 Roughly εn for some ε>0. 2 Roughly ? 3 Roughly log n? 4 Roughly a constant? Here is the collective intuition regarding this problem If you have two different boxes A with n red balls, and B with n blue balls and you take out at random with equal probabilities a ball from box A or a ... [Link]

The preprint Band Surgeries and Crossing Changes between Fibered Links by Buck-Ishihara-Rathbun-Shimokawa caught my eye this morning. They describe a describe a generalization of the plumbing of a Hopf band. Like Hopf plumbing, this operation preserves fiberedness. But unlike Hopf plumbing which occurs in a neighborhood of a disk, it is non-local occurring in a neighborhood of an annulus. I thought I’d show the product disk associated to the band. This lets one verify the persistence of fiberedness and work out the resulting monodromy which I haven’t done myself yet . Let’s talk through the construction. The generalized banding is ... [Link]

Back in February, I gave a talk with the above title at the Annual MIT Latke-Hamentaschen Debate. I’m pleased to announce that streaming video of my talk is now available! My segment starts about 10 minutes into the video, and lasts for 10 minutes. You can also download my PowerPoint slides here. Out of hundreds of talks I’ve given in my life, on five continents, this is the single talk of which I’m the proudest. Of course, before you form an opinion about the issue at hand, you should also check out the contributions of my fellow debaters. On the ... [Link]

Last month, I blogged about Sen. Tom Coburn R-Oklahoma passing an amendment blocking the National Science Foundation from funding most political science research. I wrote: This sort of political interference with the peer-review process, of course, sets a chilling precedent for all academic research, regardless of discipline. What’s next, an amendment banning computer science research, unless it has applications to scheduling baseball games or slicing apple pies? In the comments section of that post, I was pilloried by critics, who ridiculed my delusional fears about an anti-science witch hunt. Obviously, they said, Congressional Republicans only wanted to slash dubious social ... [Link]

A new portrait gallery opened this week in the James Clark Maxwell Building which houses the Edinburgh University maths department. It consists of seventy portraits of mathematicians selected, as the name suggests, by Michael and Lily Atiyah. Due to the magic of the internet, you do not have to travel to Edinburgh to see the exhibition as Andrew Ranicki, who helped organise the gallery, has made it available on his website. The Michael and Lily Atiyah Portrait Gallery The commentaries on each of the photographs give interesting personal insights of the Atiyahs. I’d definitely recommend that you younger mathematicians out ... [Link]

As those of you who’ve scrolled down the page know, the conference I mentioned a few months ago now sadly memorializing the life of Andrei Zelevinsky is starting tomorrow. Of course, for those of you who don’t live in the Boston area, coming to conference isn’t an option unless you were already traveling today, but I do have a somewhat belated announcement. Assuming that the AV gods are kind and everything goes as planned, it should be possible to watch the talks live of course, we’ll also make the videos available after the conference, in case you’re busy . The ... [Link]

You have a box with n red balls and n blue balls. You take out balls one by one at random until left only with balls of the same color. How many balls will be left as a function of n ? 1 Roughly εn for some ε>0. 2 Roughly ? 3 Roughly log n? 4 Roughly a constant? Here is the collective intuition regarding this problem If you have two different boxes A with n red balls, and B with n blue balls and you take out at random with equal probabilities a ball from box A or a ... [Link]

If Martin-Löf dependent type theory is a formal system which projects down via truncation to typed first-order logic, might we not expect there to be a modal type theory which would project down to first-order modal logic? I’ll use this post to play around with the idea. Normally we take a modal logic to be a system which allows us to study certain ways of qualifying propositions. It is necessarily the case that P; It is obligatory that P ; It is known that P, etc. With first-order modal logic, these propositions may have free variables which we can then ... [Link]

From the blog of the rare books collection of the ETH Library, I just learnt that the word for the study and classification of grape species that I was looking for is “ampelography” ampélographie in French . The relevance of this word to my daily life is that the computers on my home network are named after grapes; red grapes are reserved for desktops and white for laptops. [Link]

Andrei Zelevinsky passed away a week ago on April 10, 2013, shortly after turning sixty. Andrei was a great mathematician and a great person. I first met him in a combinatorics conference in Stockholm 1989. This was the first major conference in combinatorics and perhaps in all of mathematics with massive participation of mathematicians from the Soviet Union, and it was a meeting point for east and west and for different areas of combinatorics. The conference was organized by Anders Björner who told me that Andrei played an essential role helping to get the Russians to come. One anecdote I ... [Link]

In a previous post I told you about my Mittag-Leffler 2005 experience, and challenged you, readers, to discover the identity of a mysterious piano player. Coming from Yale, I was jet-lagged, an experience which already worked for me once in 1991 when I visited the Mittah-Leffler institute and was exploring subexponential variants of the simplex algorithm. In 2005, I came every day to my office at a very early hour in the morning and started working on quantum fault-tolerance. And very early in the morning somebody was already at the piano. Who was playing the piano for me in the ... [Link]

Physics, Computer Science, Mathematics, and Foundations’ views on quantum information Inauguration conference for the Quantum Information Science Center QISC , Hebrew university of Jerusalem Update: The news of our conference have made it to a big-league blog. [Link]

Stable mariage The Gale-Shapley stable matching theorem and the algorithm. GALE-SHAPLEY THEOREM Consider a society of n men and n women and suppose that every man [and every woman] have a preference linear relation on the women [men] he [she] knows. Then there is a stable marriage, namely a perfect matching between the men and the women so that there are no men and women which are not matched so that both of them prefer the other on their spouces. Proof: Consider the following algorithm, on day 1 every man goes to the first woman on his list and every ... [Link]

Thanks to Itai Benjamini and Ronen Eldan. Test quickly your intuition: You have a box with n red balls and n blue balls. You take out balls one by one at random until left only with balls of the same colour. How many balls will be left as a function of n ? 1 Roughly εn for some ε>0. 2 Roughly ? 3 Roughly log n? 4 Roughly a constant? Take Our Poll [Link]

Like everybody else I heard with great interest the news about the attempted solution of the ABC conjecture by Shinichi Mochizuki. See, e.g., here, here, here, and here. I did not think that this has much to with me until I discovered yesterday in my room the following remarkable document from 1999. A bet If the ABC conjecture is proved Professor Zagier will pay G. Kalai 1000 one thousand Isreali Shekels. Professor Zagier received 1 shekel in advance from G. Kalai. Signed August 31, 1999, Tel Aviv Don Zagier ABC conjecture: Witnesses: Noga Alon Laszló Lovász *** Amazing! I almost ... [Link]

Paul Erdős was born on March 26, 1913 2013 a hundred years ago. This picture from Ehud Friedgut’s homepage was taken in September ’96 in a Chinese restaurant in Warsaw, a few days before Paul Erdős passed away. The other diners are Svante Janson, Tomasz Łuczack and Ehud Friedgut. Erdős’ influence is felt everywhere in combinatorics, mathematics as a whole, and this blog as well. A few more links: my most decorated MO answer is about Erdős, a recent heated discussion on the “two cultures in mathematics,” a new post on Erdős discrepancy problem on GLL, and, most important, a ... [Link]

This is the third and last post giving a timeline and some non technical highlights from my debate with Aram Harrow. Where were we After Aram Harrow and I got in touch in June 2011, and decided to have a blog debate towards the end of 2011, the first post in our debate describing my point of view was launched on January, 2012 and was followed by three posts by Aram. The discussion was intensive and interesting. Here is a link to my 2011 paper that initiated the debate and to a recent post-debate presentation at MIT. Happy passover, readers! ... [Link]

This is a little “flashback” intermission in my posts about my debate with Aram Harrow. This time I try to refer to Cris Moore’s question regarding the motivation for my study. For the readers it gives an opportunity to win a $50 prize! Let me also bring to your attention an interesting discussion starting here between Peter Shor and me regarding smoothed Lindblad evolutions. Cris Moore, the debate’s very first comment! I am also a little confused by Gil’s motivation for his conjectures. My response: To the best of my memory, my main motivation for skeptically studying quantum fault-tolerance was ... [Link]

We are considering the stable marriage theorem. Suppose that there are n men and n women. If the preferences are random and men are proposing, what is the likely average women’s rank of their husbands, and what is the likely average men’s rank of their wives? Boris Pittel proved that on average a man will be matched to the woman in place log n on his list. Place one is his most preferred woman. A woman will be matched on average to a man ranked n/log n on her list. We asked in the post “Test your intuition 19 ” ... [Link]

We are considering the stable marriage theorem. Suppose that there are n men and n women. If the preferences are random and men are proposing, what is the likely average women’s rank of their husbands, and what is the likely average men’s rank of their wives? Boris Pittel proved that on average a man will be matched to the woman in place log n on his list. Place one is his most preferred woman. A woman will be matched on average to a man ranked n/log n on her list. We asked in the post “Test your intuition 19 ” ... [Link]

On Sunday afternoon, Dana, Lily, and I were in Copley Square in Boston for a brunch with friends, at the Mandarin Oriental hotel on Boylston Street. As I now recall, I was complaining bitterly about a number of things. First, I’d lost my passport it’s since been found . Second, we hadn’t correctly timed Lily’s feedings, making us extremely late for the brunch, and causing Lily to scream hysterically the entire car ride. Third, parking and later, locating our car at the Prudential Center was a logistical nightmare. Fourth, I’d recently received by email a profoundly silly paper, claiming that ... [Link]

Andrei Zelevinsky passed away a week ago on April 10, 2013, shortly after turning sixty. Andrei was a great mathematician and a great person. I first met him in a combinatorics conference in Stockholm 1989. This was the first major conference in combinatorics and perhaps in all of mathematics with massive participation of mathematicians from the Soviet Union, and it was a meeting point for east and west and for different areas of combinatorics. The conference was organized by Anders Björner who told me that Andrei played an essential role helping to get the Russians to come. One anecdote I ... [Link]

My student Roald Koudenburg recently successfully defended his thesis and has yesterday put his thesis on the arXiv. Roald Koudenburg, Algebraic weighted colimits I will give a rough caricature of what he does. For a much nicer overview, I suggest you read the well-written introduction to the thesis! Relating to the Café, there’s even an example including Simon Wadsley’s Theorem into Coffee. Roald was originally thinking about Ezra Getzler’s approach to operads in Operads revisited, and needed to generalize a result of Getzler’s on when the left Kan extension of a symmetric monoidal functor along a symmetric monoidal functor is ... [Link]