Doron Zeilberger, Rutgers University

Abstract

In a beautiful new "coffee table book", "Do not Erase", by the very talented artistic photographer Jessica Wynne, there are pictures of more than one hundred blackboards by a very diverse set of mathematicians. One of them is Noga Alon's blackboard. Each blackboard photo is accompanied by a short essay by the creator of the blackboard, where they often describe how they decided to become mathematicians. According to Noga Alon, the "epiphany" occurred when he was 12 years old, when he settled a heated argument in a "Eurovision watching party" that his parents threw, where he conclusively proved that a certain "measure of disarray" must always be even, in particular causing one of the guests, "a grown-up engineer", to concede that he was wrong in claiming that it was a coincidence that the scores turned out to be all even. According to Noga, this shows the objectivity of mathematical truth, and reinforced his decision to become a mathematician.

While I do agree that mathematical knowledge is more objective than most other kinds, it is not as objective as it seems. But the point of the present talk is to investigate, in a purely empirical (yet fully rigorous!) way, that same measure of disarray, that turned out to be called "Spearman's footrule", going far beyond just proving that it is always even, considerably extending a 1977 paper by Persi Diaconis and Ron Graham, there by debunking yet-another myth: that mathematics is always deductive.
Joint work with Shalosh B. Ekhad.

Link to video: https://vimeo.com/623814993

Presented Via Zoom: https://rutgers.zoom.us/j/94346444480

Password: 6564120420

For further information see: https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/expmath/