Related papers: My Favorite Math Jokes
Humor is a central aspect of human communication that has not been solved for artificial agents so far. Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly able to capture implicit and contextual information. Especially, OpenAI's ChatGPT recently…
Some scientists take themselves and their work very seriously. However, there are plenty of cases of humour being combined with science. Here I review some examples from the broad fields of physics and astronomy, particularly focusing on…
We discuss fun problems, vaguely related to notions and theorems of a course in differential geometry. This paper can be regarded as a weekend "treasure chest" supplementing the course weekday lecture notes. The problems and solutions are…
This is a structured compilation of some of my favourite open problems.
This paper describes the SemEval-2020 shared task "Assessing Humor in Edited News Headlines." The task's dataset contains news headlines in which short edits were applied to make them funny, and the funniness of these edited headlines was…
Many mathematicians find mathematics aesthetically beautiful and even comparable to art forms such as music or painting. On the other hand, every year a great number of school students leave mathematics with total disillusionment and…
This paper proposes that cognitive humor can be modeled using the mathematical framework of quantum theory. We begin with brief overviews of both research on humor, and the generalized quantum framework. We show how the bisociation of…
An improved (streamlined and extended) version of this paper is available as math.RA/0203010, which however omits some details. We recommend the later version unless details are essential.
This paper provides some reflections on the field of mathematical software on the occasion of John Rice's 65th birthday. I describe some of the common themes of research in this field and recall some significant events in its evolution.…
These are the notes from my courses on the arithmetic of quadratic forms.
This document is built around a list of thirty-two problems in enumeration of matchings, the first twenty of which were presented in a lecture at MSRI in the fall of 1996. I begin with a capsule history of the topic of enumeration of…
In this paper, I explore what mathematical research can tell us about ourselves, and our role in the world, using examples from my own experience. The paper is a sequel to my piece "Mathematics is a Quest for Truth", published in the…
The 2014 Logic Blog starts with open questions from the May IMS program in Singapore. It contains results on randomness, including answers to some open questions in higher randomness. There are structural results on equivalence relations,…
The article gives a survey of mathematical proofs that rely on computer calculations and formal proofs.
Here I share a few notes I used in various course lectures, talks, etc. Some may be just calculations that in the textbooks are more complicated, scattered, or less specific; others may be simple observations I found useful or curious.
This is a collection of open problems in geometry that I think of as puzzles: they stick to my brain -- I see many grips, but no spare hands. Puzzle-charm is the only criterion for including a problem here; importance is ignored.
This report describes the development and use of an online teaching tool giving students exercises in logical modelling, or \emph{formalisation} as it is called in the older literature. The original version of the site, `Logic for Fun',…
Randomstrasse101 is a blog dedicated to Open Problems in Mathematics, with a focus on Probability Theory, Computation, Combinatorics, Statistics, and related topics. This manuscript serves as a stable record of the Open Problems posted in…
This is a discussion of some themes in Max Tegmark's recent book, Our Mathematical Universe. It was written as a review for Plus Magazine, the online magazine of the UK's national mathematics education and outreach project, the Mathematics…
One presents many Concatenated and Operation Sequences, P-Q Relationships, Digital Sequences, Magic Squares, Prime Conjectures, k-Divisibility and Strong Divisibility Sequences, Geometric Conjectures, Proposed problems.