## Intransitive dice III

May 19, 2017

I now feel more optimistic about the prospects for this project. I don’t know whether we’ll solve the problem, but I think there’s a chance. But it seems that there is after all enough appetite to make it an “official” Polymath project. Perhaps we could also have an understanding that the pace of the project will be a little slower than it has been for most other projects. I myself have various other mathematical projects on the boil, so can’t spend too much time on this one, but quite like the idea of giving it an occasional go when the mood takes me, and trying to make slow but steady progress. So I’ve created a polymath13 category, into which this post now fits. I’ve also retrospectively changed the category for the previous two posts. I don’t think we’ve got to the stage where a wiki will be particularly useful, but I don’t rule that out at some point in the future.

In this post I want to expand on part of the previous one, to try to understand better what would need to be true for the quasirandomness assertion to be true. I’ll repeat a few simple definitions and simple facts needed to make the post more self-contained.
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## Intransitive dice II

May 12, 2017

I’m not getting the feeling that this intransitive-dice problem is taking off as a Polymath project. However, I myself like the problem enough to want to think about it some more. So here’s a post with some observations and with a few suggested subproblems that shouldn’t be hard to solve and that should shed light on the main problem. If the rate of comments by people other than me doesn’t pick up, then I think I’ll simply conclude that there wasn’t sufficient interest to run the project. However, if I do that, I have a back-up plan, which is to switch to a more traditional collaboration — that is, done privately with a small number of people. The one non-traditional aspect of it will be that the people who join the collaboration will select themselves by emailing me and asking to be part of it. And if the problem gets solved, it will be a normal multi-author paper. (There’s potentially a small problem if someone asks to join in with the collaboration and then contributes very little to it, but we can try to work out some sort of “deal” in advance.)

But I haven’t got to that point yet: let me see whether a second public post generates any more reaction.

I’ll start by collecting a few thoughts that have already been made in comments. And I’ll start that with some definitions. First of all, I’m going to change the definition of a die. This is because it probably makes sense to try to prove rigorous results for the simplest model for which they are true, and random multisets are a little bit frightening. But I am told that experiments suggest that the conjectured phenomenon occurs for the following model as well. We define an $n$-sided die to be a sequence $A=(a_1,\dots,a_n)$ of integers between 1 and $n$ such that $\sum_ia_i=n(n+1)/2$. A random $n$-sided die is just one of those chosen uniformly from the set of all of them. We say that $A$ beats $B$ if
$\sum_{i,j}\mathbf 1_{[a_i>b_j]}>\sum_{i,j}\mathbf 1_{[a_i
That is, $A$ beats $B$ if the probability, when you roll the two dice, that $A$ shows a higher number than $B$ is greater than the probability that $B$ shows a higher number than $A$. If the two probabilities are equal then we say that $A$ ties with $B$.
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## A potential new Polymath project: intransitive dice

April 28, 2017

A few days ago I received an email from Brian Conrey, who has a suggestion for a possible Polymath project. The problem he wants to see solved is a little different from the problems in most previous projects, in that it is not a well known and long-standing question of acknowledged importance. However, that is not an argument against trying it out, since it is still far from clear what kinds of problems are best suited to the polymathematical approach, and it would be good to get more data. And this problem has other qualities that could make it very suitable indeed. First of all, it is quite new — it arises from a paper published last year, though it appeared on arXiv in 2013 — so we do not yet have a clear idea of how difficult it is, which should give us hope that it may turn out to be doable. Secondly, and more importantly, it is a very attractive question.

Suppose you have a pair of dice $D_1,D_2$ with different numbers painted on their sides. Let us say that $D_1$ beats $D_2$ if, thinking of them as random variables, the probability that $D_1>D_2$ is greater than the probability that $D_2>D_1$. (Here, the rolls are of course independent, and each face on each die comes up with equal probability.) It is a famous fact in elementary probability that this relation is not transitive. That is, you can have three dice $D_1,D_2,D_3$ such that $D_1$ beats $D_2$, $D_2$ beats $D_3$, and $D_3$ beats $D_1$.

Brian Conrey, James Gabbard, Katie Grant, Andrew Liu and Kent E. Morrison became curious about this phenomenon and asked the kind of question that comes naturally to an experienced mathematician: to what extent is intransitivity “abnormal”? The way they made the question precise is also one that comes naturally to an experienced mathematician: they looked at $n$-sided dice for large $n$ and asked about limiting probabilities. (To give another example where one might do something like this, suppose one asked “How hard is Sudoku?” Well, any Sudoku puzzle can be solved in constant time by brute force, but if one generalizes the question to arbitrarily large Sudoku boards, then one can prove that the puzzle is NP-hard to solve, which gives a genuine insight into the usual situation with a $9\times 9$ board.)
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## Timothy Chow starts Polymath12

February 24, 2017

This is a quick post to draw attention to the fact that a new and very interesting looking polymath project has just started, led by Timothy Chow. He is running it over at the Polymath blog.

The problem it will tackle is Rota’s basis conjecture, which is the following statement.

Conjecture. For each $i$ let $B_i=\{e_{i1},\dots,e_{in}\}$ be a basis of an $n$-dimensional vector space $V$. Then there are $n$ disjoint bases of $V$, each containing one element from each $B_i$.

Equivalently, if you have an $n\times n$ matrix where each row is a basis, then you can permute the entries of the rows so that each column is also a basis.

This is one of those annoying problems that comes into the how-can-that-not-be-known category. Timothy Chow has a lot of interesting thoughts to get the project going, as well as explanations of why he thinks the time might be ripe for a solution.

## Time for Elsexit?

November 29, 2016

This post is principally addressed to academics in the UK, though some of it may apply to people in other countries too. The current deal that the universities have with Elsevier expires at the end of this year, and a new one has been negotiated between Elsevier and Jisc Collections, the body tasked with representing the UK universities. If you want, you can read a thoroughly misleading statement about it on Elsevier’s website. On Jisc’s website is a brief news item with a link to further details that tells you almost nothing and then contains a further link entitled “Read the full description here”, which appears to be broken. On the page with that link can be found the statement

The ScienceDirect agreement provides access to around 1,850 full text scientific, technical and medical (STM) journals – managed by renowned editors, written by respected authors and read by researchers from around the globe – all available in one place: ScienceDirect. Elsevier’s full text collection covers titles from the core scientific literature including high impact factor titles such as The Lancet, Cell and Tetrahedron.

Unless things have changed, this too is highly misleading, since up to now most Cell Press titles have not been part of the Big Deal but instead are part of a separate package. This point is worth stressing, since failure to appreciate it may cause some people to overestimate how much they rely on the Big Deal — in Cambridge at least, the Cell Press journals account for a significant percentage of our total downloads. (To be more precise, the top ten Elsevier journals accessed by Cambridge are, in order, Cell, Neuron, Current Biology, Molecular Cell, The Lancet, Developmental Cell, NeuroImage, Cell Stem Cell, Journal of Molecular Biology, and Earth and Planetary Science Letters. Of those, Cell, Neuron, Current Biology, Molecular Cell, Developmental Cell and Cell Stem Cell are Cell Press journals, and they account for over 10% of all our access to Elsevier journals.)

Jisc has also put up a Q&A, which can be found here.
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## Call for nominations for the 2018 Chern Medal

November 14, 2016

This is a guest post by Caroline Series.

The Chern Medal is a relatively new prize, awarded once every four years jointly by the IMU and the Chern Medal Foundation (CMF) to an individual whose accomplishments warrant the highest level of recognition for outstanding achievements in the field of mathematics. Funded by the CMF, the Medalist receives a cash prize of US$250,000. In addition, each Medalist may nominate one or more organizations to receive funding totalling US$ 250,000, for the support of research, education, or other outreach programs in the field of mathematics.

Professor Chern devoted his life to mathematics, both in active research and education, and in nurturing the field whenever the opportunity arose. He obtained fundamental results in all the major aspects of modern geometry and founded the area of global differential geometry. Chern exhibited keen aesthetic tastes in his selection of problems, and the breadth of his work deepened the connections of geometry with different areas of mathematics. He was also generous during his lifetime in his personal support of the field.

Nominations should be sent to the Prize Committee Chair: Caroline Series, email: chair(at)chern18.mathunion.org by 31st December 2016. Further details and nomination guidelines for this and the other IMU prizes can be found here.

## Quick update on Leicester

November 2, 2016

I’m very happy to report that it seems that some kind of deal seems to have been reached, the details of which I don’t yet know anything about, which means that $n$ of the mathematics faculty at Leicester will not after all have to reapply for their positions with only $n-6$ of those positions on offer. If I find out more, I will add to this post, and if I learn of some kind of announcement online I will provide a link to it. But in the meantime, many thanks to the thousands of people from around the world who signed the petition — the strength of feeling was impressive and I think it may have made a difference.

## Discrete Analysis one year on

October 5, 2016

This is cross posted from the blog on the Discrete Analysis web page.

Approximately a year on from the announcement of Discrete Analysis, it seems a good moment to take stock and give a quick progress report, so here it is.

At the time of writing (5th October 2016) we have 17 articles published and are on target to reach 20 by the end of the year. (Another is accepted and waiting for the authors to produce a final version.) We are very happy with the standard of the articles. The journal has an ISSN, each article has a DOI, and articles are listed on MathSciNet. We are not yet listed on Web of Science, so we do not have an impact factor, but we will soon start the process of applying for one.

We are informed by Scholastica that between June 6th and September 27th 2016 the journal had 18,980 pageviews. (In the not too distant future we will have the analytics available to us whenever we want to look at them.) The number of views of the page for a typical article is in the low hundreds, but that probably underestimates the number of times people read the editorial introduction for a given article, since that can be done from the main journal pages. So getting published in Discrete Analysis appears to be a good way to attract attention to your article — we hope more than if you post it on the arXiv and wait for it to appear a long time later in a journal of a more conventional type.

We have had 74 submissions so far, of which 14 are still in process. Our acceptance rate is 37%, but some submissions are not serious mathematics, and if these are discounted then the rate is probably somewhere around 50%. I think the 74 includes revised versions of previously submitted articles, so the true figure is a little lower. Our average time to reject a non-serious submission is 7 days, our average to reject a more serious submission is 47 days, and our average time to accept is 121 days. There is considerable variance in these figures, so they should be interpreted cautiously.

There has been one change of policy since the launch of the journal. László Babai, founder of the online journal Theory of Computing, which, like Discrete Analysis, is free to read and has no publication charges, very generously offered to provide for us a suitable adaptation of their style file. As a result, our articles will from now on have a uniform appearance and, more importantly, will appear with their metadata: after a while it seemed a little strange that the official version of one of our articles would not say anywhere that it was published by Discrete Analysis, but now it tells you that, and the number of the article, the date of publication, the DOI, and so on. So far, our two most recent articles have been formatted — you can see them here and here — and in due course we will reformat all the earlier ones.

If you have an article that you think might suit the journal (and now that we have several articles on our website it should be easier to judge this), we would be very pleased to receive it: 20 articles in our first year is a good start, but we hope that in due course the journal will be perceived as established and the submission rate of good articles will increase. (For comparison, Combinatorica published 31 articles in 2015, and Combinatorics, Probability and Computing publishes around 55 articles a year, to judge from a small sample of issues.)

## In case you haven’t heard what’s going on in Leicester …

September 15, 2016

Strangely, this is my second post about Leicester in just a few months, but it’s about something a lot more depressing than the football team’s fairytale winning of the Premier League (but let me quickly offer my congratulations to them for winning their first Champions League match — I won’t offer advice about whether they are worth betting on to win that competition too). News has just filtered through to me that the mathematics department is facing compulsory redundancies.

The structure of the story is wearily familiar after what happened with USS pensions. The authorities declare that there is a financial crisis, and that painful changes are necessary. They offer a consultation. In the consultation their arguments appear to be thoroughly refuted. The refutation is then ignored and the changes go ahead.

Here is a brief summary of the painful changes that are proposed for the Leicester mathematics department. The department has 21 permanent research-active staff. Six of those are to be made redundant. There are also two members of staff who concentrate on teaching. Their number will be increased to three. How will the six be chosen? Basically, almost everyone will be sacked and then invited to reapply for their jobs in a competitive process, and the plan is to get rid of “the lowest performers” at each level of seniority. Those lowest performers will be considered for “redeployment” — which means that the university will make efforts to find them a job of a broadly comparable nature, but doesn’t guarantee to succeed. It’s not clear to me what would count as broadly comparable to doing pure mathematical research.

How is performance defined? It’s based on things like research grants, research outputs, teaching feedback, good citizenship, and “the ongoing and potential for continued career development and trajectory”, whatever that means. In other words, on the typical flawed metrics so beloved of university administrators, together with some subjective opinions that will presumably have to come from the department itself — good luck with offering those without creating enemies for life.

Oh, and another detail is that they want to reduce the number of straight maths courses and promote actuarial science and service teaching in other departments.

There is a consultation period that started in late August and ends on the 30th of September. So the lucky members of the Leicester mathematics faculty have had a whole month to marshall their to-be-ignored arguments against the changes.

It’s important to note that mathematics is not the only department that is facing cuts. But it’s equally important to note that it is being singled out: the university is aiming for cuts of 4.5% on average, and mathematics is being asked to make a cut of more like 20%. One reason for this seems to be that the department didn’t score all that highly in the last REF. It’s a sorry state of affairs for a university that used to boast Sir Michael Atiyah as its chancellor.

I don’t know what can be done to stop this, but at the very least there is a petition you can sign. It would be good to see a lot of signatures, so that Leicester can see how damaging a move like this will be to its reputation.

## ∈

June 2, 2016

For several reasons, I am instinctively in favour — strongly so — of remaining in the EU: I have a French wife and two bilingual children, and I am an academic living in the age of the internet. The result is that my whole outlook is international, and leaving the EU would feel to me like a gigantic step in the wrong direction. But in this post I want to try to set those instincts aside and try to go back to first principles, which doesn’t make it a mathematical post, but does make it somewhat mathematical in spirit. That is why I have chosen as my title the mathematical symbol for “is a member of”, which can also be read (in some contexts) as “in”, and which conveniently looks like an E for Europe too.

I’ll consider three questions: why we need supranational organizations, to what extent we should care about sovereignty, and whether we should focus on the national interest.

### The need for supranational organizations

In the abstract, the case for supranational organizations is almost too obvious to be worth making: just as it often benefits individual people to form groups and agree to restrict their behaviour in certain ways, so it can benefit nations to join groups and agree to restrict their behaviour in certain ways.

To see in more detail why this should be, I’ll look at some examples, starting with an example concerning individual people. It has sometimes been suggested that a simple way of dealing with the problem of drugs in sport would be to allow people to use whatever drugs they want. Even with the help of drugs, the Ben Johnsons of this world can’t set world records and win Olympic gold medals unless they are also amazing athletes, so if we allowed drugs, there would still be a great deal of room for human achievement.

There are many arguments against this proposal. A particularly powerful one is that allowing drugs has the effect of making them compulsory: they offer enough of a boost to performance that a drug-free athlete would almost certainly be unable to compete at the highest level if a large proportion of other athletes were taking drugs. Since taking drugs has serious adverse health effects — for instance, it has led to the deaths of several cyclists — it is better if competitors agree to forswear this method of gaining a competitive advantage. But just saying, “I won’t take drugs if you don’t” isn’t enough, since for any individual there will always be a huge temptation to break such an agreement. So one also needs organizations to which athletes belong, with precise rules and elaborate systems of testing.
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