The Kelmans-Seymour conjecture explained

Breakthrough! There was exciting news in the mathematics world recently, when it was announced that Xingxing Yu, Yan Wang and Dawei He from Georgia Tech proved the Kelman-Seymour conjecture. The 120-page paper containing the proof has been posted to the preprint server arXiv. Given the length of the paper, it will take time for reviewers to verify it. We…

“Let’s not do math today”

Kids learn by example A classroom of kids cheer with joy. Later that day a boy runs in the front door of his house and says: “Mom, teacher said we didn’t have to do math today!” Sound like fiction? It’s not. A mathematician colleague of mine told me that her son experienced this in his elementary school. Some kids…

Interview with a mathematician: Maria Chudnovsky

Maria Chudnovsky is a leading mathematician working in the field of graph theory. She was born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1977, and moved to Israel with her family at the age of thirteen. Maria studied mathematics at Technion in Haifa. She completed her PhD at Princeton University in 2003, supervised by Paul Seymour. Maria has the most…

Review: The Man Who Knew Infinity

As The Man Who Knew Infinity goes into wide release in theatres here in Canada on May 20, I am re-blogging my review of the movie. This is a special blog post today, as I usually post on Wednesdays. Stay tuned next Wednesday, May 18 for my interview with Maria Chudnovsky. I was lucky enough to…