Facing nonexistential realities

Neil L. is a Leprechaun. He has graced these pages before.

Today, the day before St. Patrick’s Day, we ponder universal riddles of existence. Ken, who will visit me this coming week, insisted on reporting what happened this morning.

Bill and Clyde’s new book

Bill Gasarch and Clyde Kruskal are colleagues in Computer Science at the University of Maryland. They have just seen the publication of their book Problems With a Point.

Today Dick and I congratulate them on the book and give a brief overview of it.

Some irksome phrases that appear on the web

 [ Jimmy Wales ]

Jimmy Wales is the co-founder of Wikipedia. Of course this is the wonderful online non-profit encyclopedia we all know and love.

Today I want to talk about using the web to search for math information.

Finding a set of nearly independent objects

 Wikipedia bio source

Giuseppe Vitali was the mathematician who famously used the Axiom of Choice, in 1905, to give the first example of a non-measurable subset of the real numbers.

Today I want to discuss another of his results that is a powerful tool. Read more…

To solving the big questions, that is

 Cropped from Device Plus source

Tetsuya Miyamoto is a mathematics teacher who divides his time between Tokyo and Manhattan. He is known for creating in 2004 the popular KenKen puzzle, which the New York Times started running ten years ago. As with its sister puzzles Sudoku and Kakuro, unlimited-size versions of it are ${\mathsf{NP}}$-complete.

Today we observe the 10th anniversary of this blog and ask what progress has been made on the ${\mathsf{P=NP}}$ question.

Solving a type of Fermat Equation

Leo Moser was a mathematician who worked on a very varied set of problems. He for example raised a question about “worms,” and invented a notation for huge numbers.

Today I want to talk about one of his results with a very short proof.