Test Your Intuition 56: Fifteen Boxes Puzzle

Moshe Vardi wrote a short interesting essay “What is theoretical computer science?” (It followed by interesting posts on Facebook.) Moshe argues that Thinking of theoretical computer science (TCS) as a branch of mathematics is harmful to the discipline. I personally … Continue reading →

“Time for Peace” (זמן לשלום), Lyrics: Amnon Abutbul, Yair Dalal, Fathi Kasem; Melody: Amnon Abutbul. Performing Shlomit Aharon and Yevgeni Shapovalov. This year I had the rare event that the new Jewish year coincides with my birthday, and “time for … Continue reading →

There are very many irrational numbers but proving irrationality of a specific number is not a common event. A few weeks ago Frank Calegari, Vesselin Dimitrov, and Yunqing Tang posted a paper that proved the irrationality of  . In fact … Continue reading →

Viterbo conjecture – refuted Claude Viterbo’s 2000 volume-capacity conjecture asserts that the Euclidean (even dimensional) ball maximizes  (every) symplectic capacity  among convex bodies of the same volume. In the recent paper A Counterexample to Viterbo’s Conjecture, Pazit Haim-Kislev and Yaron … Continue reading →

TYI56 asked the following question of Timothy Chow: You have fifteen boxes labelled with the English letters from A to O. Two identical prizes are placed in two (distinct) boxes chosen at random. Andrew’s  search order is  ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO. Barbara’s search … Continue reading →