Monday, July 28, 2014

I've recently been involved in the formation of the Wits Undergrad Maths Society

This has involved going to a bunch of lectures and handing out sign up sheets. It's also involved a lot of talking to lecturers and other organizers to timetable this but I want to focus on the signup sheets.

Turns out that a fair number of students use there wits e-mail addresses and a fair number use something else (g-mail the most common). By inspection there seems to be a very very large correlation between what sheet you signed and which e-mail you put down. that is to say that some of the sheets are almost completely (or in some smaller cases completely) covered with students using there wits e-mail while others are almost devoid of student e-mails. 

Presumably students look at the first few people putting down a wits e-mail address and decide to copy or see the first few haven't and decide to use the non-wits address. Anyone have any thoughts on what causes this?

Friday, July 18, 2014

Hats

Dmytro Yeroshkin and myself have uploaded a paper to the archive here .
It's on a  hats game which is well described here by Tanya Khovanova, and originally proposed by Lionel Levine

There are a lot of opportunities for future work left. In particular the original problem with alot of wise men instead of the 2 player case described in our paper.