Related papers: But some are more equal than others
The most common difference that occurs among the consecutive primes less than or equal to $x$ is called a jumping champion. Occasionally there are ties. Therefore there can be more than one jumping champion for a given $x$. In 1999 A.…
Suppose you look at today's stock prices and bet on the value of the first digit. One could guess that a fair bet should correspond to the frequency of $1/9 = 11.11%$ for each digit from 1 to 9. This is by no means the case, and one can…
Two number fields are called arithmetically equivalent if they have the same Dedekind zeta function. In the 1970's Perlis showed that this is equivalent to the condition that for almost every rational prime $\ell$ the arithmetic type of…
Behavioral experiments on the Ultimatum Game have shown that we human beings have remarkable preference in fair play, contradicting the predictions by the game theory. Most of the existing models seeking for explanations, however, strictly…
Ann likes oranges much more than apples; Bob likes apples much more than oranges. Tomorrow they will receive one fruit that will be an orange or an apple with equal probability. Giving one half to each agent is fair for each realization of…
Well protected human and laboratory animal populations with abundant resources are evolutionary unprecedented. Physical approach, which takes advantage of their extensively quantified mortality, establishes that its dominant fraction yields…
In 1970, Statistics giant, Bradley Efron, amazed the world by coming up with a set of four dice, let's call them A,B,C,D, whose faces are marked with [0,0,4,4,4,4], [3,3,3,3,3,3],[2,2,2,2,6,6],[1,1,1,5,5,5] respectively, where die A beats…
Equitability is a well-studied fairness notion in fair division, where an allocation is equitable if all agents receive equal utility from their allocation. For indivisible items, an exactly equitable allocation may not exist, and a natural…
General equilibrium equations in economics play the same role with many-body Newtonian equations in physics. Accordingly, each solution of the general equilibrium equations can be regarded as a possible microstate of the economic system.…
Analogical proportions are statements of the form "$a$ is to $b$ as $c$ is to $d$", which expresses that the comparisons of the elements in pair $(a, b)$ and in pair $(c, d)$ yield similar results. Analogical proportions are creative in the…
Well protected human and laboratory animal populations with abundant resources are evolutionary unprecedented, and their survival far beyond reproductive age may be a byproduct rather than tool of evolution. Physical approach, which takes…
When dividing items among agents, two of the most widely studied fairness notions are envy-freeness and proportionality. We consider a setting where $m$ chores are allocated to $n$ agents and the disutility of each chore for each agent is…
Consider a gambler who observes a sequence of independent, non-negative random numbers and is allowed to stop the sequence at any time, claiming a reward equal to the most recent observation. The famous prophet inequality of Krengel,…
``Behind every limit theorem, there is an inequality'' said Kolmogorov. We say ``for every inequality, there is an approximate inequality under approximate regularity conditions.'' Suppose $X, X'$ are independent and identically distributed…
In 2017 M. Bessenyei and Z. P\'ales introduced a definition of a triangle function which generates a concept of a generalized triangle inequality in semimetric spaces. Inspired by this concept we discuss already known inequalities in metric…
The union-closed sets conjecture, attributed to P\'eter Frankl from 1979, states that for any non-empty finite union-closed family of finite sets not consisting of only the empty set, there is an element that is in at least half of the sets…
The well-known three distance theorem states that there are at most three distinct gaps between consecutive elements in the set of the first n multiples of any real number. We generalise this theorem to higher dimensions under a suitable…
Frigyes Karinthy, in his 1929 short story "L\'aancszemek" ("Chains") suggested that any two persons are distanced by at most six friendship links. (The exact wording of the story is slightly ambiguous: "He bet us that, using no more than…
An $(X,Y)$-descent in a permutation is a pair of adjacent elements such that the first element is from $X$, the second element is from $Y$, and the first element is greater than the second one. An $(X,Y)$-adjacency in a permutation is a…
A conjecture of Talagrand (2010) states that the so-called expectation and fractional expectation thresholds are always within at most some constant factor from each other. In this note we generalize a method of DeMarco and Kahn and settle…