Monthly Archives: June 2013

Advice for (Berkeley) Ph. D. students in math -Bjorn Poonen

Occasionally, I have a chance to find this article posted on Dr. Bjorn Poonen‘s personal site. He gave quite a lot suggestions not only for Berkeley PhD students, in my view, but also for all the math graduate students. The … Continue reading

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How “small” can the gap be? -A huge landmark in number theory.

What’s the gap between consecutive primes? One can easily observe that the gap will keep increasing as the primes become far rarer. However, for the bounded gap, there exists infinitely many pairs of primes. This is a form of the … Continue reading

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The Conjecture of Marie-Sophie Germain

Numbers pervade our lives in many different venues.  Prime numbers, in particular, weave their way into the very fabric of our daily existence.   From surfing the internet to pseudo-random number generators, primes are found ever present behind a multitude of … Continue reading

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Newcomb’s Paradox

In the realm of mathematical puzzles and thought experiments one can find a stock pile of paradoxes.   The Mariam-Webster Dictionary defines a paradox as “an argument that apparently derives self-contradictory conclusions by valid deduction from acceptable premises.”  One short example … Continue reading

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An Interview with John Huerta

John Huerta is a recent mathematics PhD graduate from  the University of California, Riverside, where he worked with John Baez. Together Huerta and Baez won the 2013 Conant prize. A huge thank you to Dr. Huerta for answering some questions for … Continue reading

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