New CS Tenure Track Positions, New program in Manhattan

Do you happen to know anyone who is looking for a CS Tenure Track position in Manhattan? Someone who might be interested in being part of a new CS program and help decide the directions it will grow into? Please share this with them: https://geometrynyc.wixsite.com/csjobs.

CS Tenure Track Positions at CUNY

Interested in a computer science position in Manhattan? Apply to our positions here!

We are starting to form a computer science program at CUNY’s Baruch College. Joining us at the beginning of this process will give you a chance to influence how computer science will look like at our college: the research and teaching directions that it would focus on, the type of faculty that will be hired, and so on. We are accepting applications from all areas of computer science.

Yes, it is weird that we did not have computer science earlier. Traditionally, Baruch is CUNY’s business school, so the focus of computer classes has been on information systems rather than on computer science. However, recent trends in business have increased student demand for classes in computer science even among business majors.

The effort to create a computer science program is based at the mathematics department, in collaboration with Computer Information Systems, which is part of our business school. We already have a few people who work in computer science, such as Guy Moshkovitz and myself. We hope to hire several more computer scientists over the next few years.

We hope to have a diverse group of computer scientists. Women and underrepresented minorities are encouraged to apply!

For more information, you are welcome to contact me.

The 2021 Polymath Jr Program

Summer Opportunity: Polymath Jr Research Experience for Undergraduates. The goal of this remote program is to provide opportunities to undergraduates who wish to explore research mathematics. The program consists of research projects on a wide variety of mathematical topics. Each project is guided by an active researcher with experience in undergraduate mentoring. All undergraduates who have experience with writing mathematical proofs are eligible. Part-time participation is also allowed; preference is given to students who will not have an undergraduate degree by July 2021. 

The program will run from June 21st to August 15th, 2021. For more details, see https://geometrynyc.wixsite.com/polymathreu and apply by early April at https://www.mathprograms.org/db; for additional questions contact adam.sheffer@baruch.cuny.edu.

An Algorithms Course with Minimal Prerequisites

There are amazing materials for teaching theoretical algorithms courses: excellent books, lecture notes, and online courses. But none of the resources I am familiar with fits the algorithms course I was supposed to prepare. I wanted to teach a course for students who hardly have any prerequisites.

My students are non-CS majors (mostly math majors), so they did not take a data structures course. I also cannot assume that they have experience with probability, graph theory, linear algebra, writing proofs, and so on. So I made a class that only has two basic requirements:

• Basic programming background: being comfortable with loops, if-else statements, and recursion.
• No mathematical knowledge beyond calculus is required. However, the course is aimed at people who are comfortable with mathematical/abstract thinking.

Even though the course assumes minimum prerequisites, it gets into the technical details and some of the problems require a lot of thinking (although not at the beginning of course).

I made an effort to include many real-world applications, historical anecdotes, horrible jokes, and more. You can find the lecture notes and assignments by clicking on this sentence.

Any comments, questions, and complaints are welcome!

Teenagers doing Mathematical Research

I’d like to ramble about another program that our group is running. We are searching for unusually promising high-school-age students and mentor each in a serious research project. We started doing this already before our REU program. However, I never advertised this program before, because I felt that we were still learning how to do such mentoring. We are still learning, but I now feel more comfortable talking about this.

A couple of recent students. Let’s start with a couple of examples. These are the two most recent young students we worked with.

Kiki Pichini is currently 16 years old. She lives in a small town in the middle of Washington State, far from any big city. A few years ago, she wanted to learn more advanced mathematics but did not wish to leave home at her age. So she enrolled to an online undergraduate program of Indiana University. She will complete her undergraduate degree this upcoming spring.

While working on her degree at 15, Kiki wanted to continue to even more advanced projects, so I started working with her on a research project. This was done purely by email and video chats. Kiki just submitted her paper to a combinatorics journal. It can also be found on arXiv here. Kiki improved the current best upper bound on the number of rectangulations a planar point set can have – a bound that remained unchanged since 2006. She was recently accepted to a graduate program at Oxford.

Our second most recent student is Michael Manta. Michael is a high-school student in Xavier High School in New York City. He was studying more advanced mathematics through an NYC-based program called Math-M-Addicts. We met Michael in the summer after his sophomore high-school year. He worked under the mentorship of Frank de Zeeuw and proved a new result about triangle colorings of the plane. He submitted his paper to a combinatorics journal a few months ago and it is currently being refereed. The paper can also be found on arXiv.

Michael was accepted to many top colleges. Eventually he chose to attend Caltech. After finishing his research project, he wanted to do more math. So he is currently taking a couple of the more advanced courses our department has to offer.

We’re Hiring!

Come join us! This year our math department has two types of positions available. We have a standard tenure track position, which would hopefully continue our awesome sequence of recent hires. But this post is not about the standard position. Instead, I’d like to talk a bit about our other type of position – a Lecturer position.

The lecturer position is basically a teaching-based “tenure-track” position. This brief description gives the wrong impression about the position. So here is a bit more information:

• Lecturers must have a Ph.D. in math. They choose whether they wish to continue doing research – some do and others don’t. (This summer one of our lecturers had a paper accepted to the Annals of Mathematics!)
• Our lecturers are some of the most highly respected people in the department. All of our current lecturers are amazingly professional and productive. They run a large part of the department, work closely with the chair, and so on.
• After 5 years, a lecturer applies to receive a CCE status (Certificate of Continuous Employment), somewhat similar to tenure.

If you are a strong and enthusiastic teacher, and may be interested to join our team, apply on mathjobs.org. (Here is our standard tenure track position). I very much hope that we will hire someone who could be part of our REU program. But I’m only one person, and others have other priorities.

Since Baruch College is not the most well-known place in the mathematical world, I would like to also tell you a bit about us.

• Baruch College is highly focused affordability, diversity, and social mobility. It is consistently ranked #1 in Social Mobility Index, towards the top of Money magazine’s Best Colleges For Your Money, WSJ Biggest Bargains Among U.S. Colleges, Affordable elite ranking, and so on.
• We have a strong group of “junior” mathematicians. For example, Louis-Pierre Arguin‘s work was recently featured in the Bourbaki seminar (Louis-Pierre also holds an NSF career award). Other recent hires include strong people such as Yumeng Ou and Andrew Obus.
• Our department’s financial math team has several impressive achievements. The master’s program in Financial Engineering is consistently ranked as one of the top in the world (see here and here) and the financial math students keep winning trading competitions (see here).
• I believe that another advantage of our department is its unusually friendly and positive atmosphere. Somehow one does not see very bad politics here. For example, our last vote for the executive committee (handling hiring, tenure, etc.) was over extremely quickly and was almost unanimous.

Abstraction is Hard

A few weeks ago I read Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point. The book doesn’t really deal with mathematics, but it does contain one math-related anecdote. This anecdote demonstrates an interesting principle of learning mathematics, so I wanted to share it.

Problem 1. We have a deck of cards, such that each card contains a digit on one side and an English letter on the other. We are dealing four cards, with the following result:

We are told that behind every vowel there is an even digit. Which of the four cards should we flip to check whether this claim is true?

I suspect that most mathematicians would only need a few seconds to answer this. On the other hand, people who are not used to mathematical logic would probably need a minute to get to the correct answer.

Problem 2. A cop walks into a bar to check for underage drinking and sees four people drinking. From a first glance, the cop notices that the first is a teenager, the second drinks water, the third is middle aged, and the fourth is drinking beer. Which of the four people should the cop check more carefully?

Most people would probably answer this problem immediately. This is interesting, since the two problems are completely identical! The only difference is that the second problem has a social context while the first is abstract. Even experienced mathematicians probably need to think for a couple of seconds to solve the first problem, but not the second.

This is a nice demonstration of why it is difficult to start studying advanced math. I will definitely use it when teaching proofs classes.

Here is another example of abstract things being hard to get:

Linear Algebra Riddle

I’d like to tell you about a nice riddle, which I heard from Bob Krueger (one of our current REU participants, who already has four papers on arXiv!!). The riddle requires very basic linear algebra and is in the spirit of the previous post.

Riddle. A library has books and subscribers. Each subscriber read at least one book from the library. Prove that there must exist two disjoint sets of subscribers who read exactly the same books (that is, the union of the books read by the subscribers in each set is the same).

Hint: Very basic linear algebra. Try the first thing that comes to mind.

The Math Art of Gábor Damásdi

You may have noticed that the credit for the drawing in my previous post went to Gábor Damásdi. Gábor is a PhD student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is also one of the top math art creators I have met.

Gábor Damásdi.

I think it took Gábor less than two minutes to prepare the drawing for the previous post, and this is one of his least interesting creations. Check out his site, which contains many more interesting things. You can find there drawings and animation of many mathematical results. Here is an animation of Pascal’s theorem:

Here is a Voronoi diagram of moving points:

I hope that in the future we’d have more of Gábor’s creations in this blog!

Child Care at STOC 2018 + Riddle

I’ve been asked to post the following message by the STOC 2018 local arrangements chairs – Ilias Diakonikolas and David Kempe.

We are pleased to announce that we will provide pooled, subsidized
child care at STOC 2018. The cost will be $40 per day per child for
regular conference attendees, and $20 per day per child for students.
For more detailed information, including how to register for STOC 2018
childcare, see http://acm-stoc.org/stoc2018/childcare.html

To have something slightly mathematical in this post, here’s a cute riddle: 100 passengers enter an airplane one at a time. The plane contains 100 seats and every passanger has a ticket with a seat number. The first passanger lost his ticket, so he randomly chooses a seat (uniformly). When any other passanger enters, if their seat is available they use it, and otherwise they randomly choose one of the available seats (uniformly). What is the probability that the last passanger got their correct seat.

Finally the name of this blog makes sense!