Related papers: Martin Gardner's Mistake
First proved my Donald Martin in 1975, the result of Borel determinacy has been the subject of multiple revised proofs. Following Martin's book [1], we present a recent streamlined proof which implements ideas of Martin, Moschovakis, and…
The purpose of this note is twofold: firstly to improve the known results on variation of extreme eigenvalues of birth and death matrices and random walk matrices; and secondly to progress towards the solution of a thirty years old open…
Since a few years, the Schr\"odinger problem captures the attention of a growing community of mathematicians interested in optimal transport problems. The first result of existence of a solution to this problem dates back to 1940, when…
All priors are not created equal. There are right and there are wrong priors. That is the main conclusion of this contribution. I use, a cooked-up example designed to create drama, and a typical textbook example to show the pervasiveness of…
This is a collection of variants of Schanuel's conjecture and the known dependencies between them. It was originally written in 2007, and made available for a time on my webpage. I have been asked by a few people to make it available again…
The thought experiment (called the clock paradox or the twin paradox)proposed by Langevin in 1911 of two observers, one staying on Earth and the other making a trip toward a star with a velocity near the light velocity is very well known…
The "paradox" arises in the Two Envelopes Paradox from the incorrect formulation of the argument. The infomation given is misused and therefore the results are incorrect for the question asked. The key is to be clear on what question we are…
We here focus on the problem of predicting the popularity trend of user generated content (UGC) as early as possible. Taking YouTube videos as case study, we propose a novel two-step learning approach that: (1) extracts popularity trends…
In Martin Gardner's October, 1976 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American, he posed the following problem: "What is the smallest number of [queens] you can put on a board of side n such that no [queen] can be added without creating…
This paper collects some problems that I have encountered during the years, have puzzled me and which, to the best of my knowledge, are still open. Most of them are well-known and have been first stated by other authors. In this sad season…
The Monty Hal problem is an attractive puzzle. It combines simple statement with answers that seem surprising to most audiences. The problem was thoroughly solved over two decades ago. Yet, more recent discussions indicate that the solution…
The Collatz conjecture is a famous math problem that was introduced by Lothar Collatz in 1937, and nobody has yet succeeded in proving or disproving it. In this article, I will analyze this problem with a new approach and I will discuss my…
Two years ago, we alarmed the scientific community about the large number of bad papers in the literature on {\it zero difference balanced functions}, where direct proofs of seemingly new results are presented in an unnecessarily lengthy…
I revisit some classic publications on modularity, to show what problems its pioneers wanted to solve. These problems occur with spreadsheets too: to recognise them may help us avoid them.
This paper considers the two-dataset problem, where data are collected from two potentially different populations sharing common aspects. This problem arises when data are collected by two different types of researchers or from two…
In 1988, in cooperation with a team of experimental physicists, a Condensed Matter theorist, X, published in Physical Review Letters a crucial experimental result dealing with a revolutionary new theory. The conclusions of the paper were…
This article is an expanded version of my talk at the Gathering for Gardner, 2012.
Math is widely considered as a powerful tool and its strong appeal depends on the high level of abstraction it allows in modelling a huge number of heterogeneous phenomena and problems, spanning from the static of buildings to the flight of…
Conway's 99-graph problem is the second problem amongst the five 1000\$ 2017 open problems set. Four out of the five remain unsolved to this day, including the 99-graph problem. In this paper we quote Conway's definition of the problem and…
A quite old problem has been recently revitalized by Leonard Mlodinow's book The Drunkard's Walk, where it is presented in a way that has definitely confused several people, that wonder why the prevalence of the name of one daughter among…