Noam D. Elkies is a
Harvard mathematician whose main research interests have to do with
lattices and elliptic curves. He is also a very talented composer of
chess problems. The problem to teh left is a proof game
in 14 moves. That is, find the UNIQUE legal chess game leading to the
given situation after the 14th move by black. Elkies has also written a
beautiful paper On Numbers
and Endgames applying combinatorial game theory (a la Winning
Ways!) to chess-endgames (mutual Zugzwang positions correspond to zero
positions) and a follow-up article Higher Nimbers in pawn
endgames on large chessboards. Together with Richard Stanley he wrote a
paper for the Mathematical Intelligencer called The Mathematical
Knight which is stuffed with chess problems! But perhaps most
surprising is that he managed to run his own course on Chess and
Mathematics!
neverendingbooks Posts
Yet another great Google service : Google Scholar. Just type in a name
(for example mine) and you will get a
list of all his/her publications which are listed on the net. A
printable version of the paper if possible, a reference if not. In the
first case it even lists all versions available on the net. But even in
the latter case it has an extremely useful link next to it “Cited
by somany” which gives all references to the paper Google can
find. Clearly, it also finds all papers posted on the arXiv but the
great additional value is that you no longer have to search departmental
or personal webpages yourself. If you want to find out more about this
service, read the about page.
What would you do if 80% of your blog is owned by the
_companies_ of your Ph.D. students? First, try to talk them into
selling some of their blogshares back to the public. If this fails,
threaten never to post on your blog again until the share-price has sunk
deep enough to force them into selling. If this fails also and if you
see that the price only goes up no matter how long you remain silent, it
is time for more drastic measures. Luckily, blogshares allows the owner of a
blog to issue new shares, thereby flooding the market and stabilizing
the price. I was forced into this twice this week (the two horizontal
lines in the diagram) : on monday I issued another 5000 shares dropping
their 80% to 40% but today they acquired again 50.1% forcing me into
issuing another 1000 shares… Clearly it would be fun if more of
you out there would be buying shares of this blog (I will stick to the
1000 shares I got by claiming the blog) but I will keep on issuing new
shares whenever one player acquires more than 50%. All of this
blogshares-stuff is a bit surrealistic. In less than one week the
share-value went from 0.76 to 62.73 and the total value of all public
owned shares from 0.00 to 377383.00 and at best I wrote one reasonable
post in the same period. Oh, the stress of having to maintain an
acceptable level of postings in order to preserve the property of the
shareholders of your blog…
As if this is not enough, some
bloggers start feeling guilty because they cannot maintain their rhytm
of updates in times that they feel sick or tired. Here's what Bitch Ph.D. wrote yesterday
Leave a CommentI think I need a break from blogging. Well,
actually I need a break from a lot of things, but blogging is optional.
Plus, I really just have nothing of substance to say right now. I hate
to be all drama-queeny, and fuck, maybe I'll change my mind if the
meds kick in tomorrow. Though actually I think they're working in
that I still feel shitty and anxious but
it's—just—manageable enough for me to function at a sort
of minimal level. Or maybe that's a placebo effect. Who the hell
knows.Anyway , the point of this post other than to just
say I feel incredibly shitty is to be giving myself public permission to
be a shitty blogger for however long it takes until I actually want to
talk again.