Posted on 05/22/2020 2:44:42 PM PDT by DUMBGRUNT
It took Lisa Piccirillo less than a week to answer a long-standing question about a strange knot discovered over half a century ago by the legendary John Conway.
In the summer of 2018, at a conference on low-dimensional topology and geometry, Lisa Piccirillo heard about a nice little math problem. It seemed like a good testing ground for some techniques she had been developing as a graduate student at the University of Texas, Austin.
“I didn’t allow myself to work on it during the day,” she said, “because I didn’t consider it to be real math. I thought it was, like, my homework.”
Before the week was out, Piccirillo had an answer: The Conway knot is not “slice.” A few days later, she met with Cameron Gordon, a professor at UT Austin, and casually mentioned her solution.
“I said, ‘What?? That’s going to the Annals right now!’” Gordon said, referring to Annals of Mathematics, one of the discipline’s top journals.
“He started yelling, ‘Why aren’t you more excited?’” said Piccirillo, now a postdoctoral fellow at Brandeis University. “He sort of freaked out.”
“I don’t think she’d recognized what an old and famous problem this was,” Gordon said.
Piccirillo’s proof appeared in Annals of Mathematics in February. The paper, combined with her other work, has secured her a tenure-track job offer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that will begin on July 1, only 14 months after she finished her doctorate.
(Excerpt) Read more at quantamagazine.org ...
(30 + x) / 2 = 60
60 + 2x = 120
2x = 180
x = 90
that’s exactly what I thought.
And that's a hot nerd girl.
Striking eyes.
“I don’t think Lisa Piccirillo would be interested in meeting me for drinks..........”
With an FR join date of 1998, you are probably of a different generation and run in different circles...
“Warp speed?”
I spent way too much time with time and distance averaging and harmonic averaging...
CRAP! If only I was smart, I could have been a contender!!!
Clearly Warp speed would do it!!!
Damn.
90 mph
I agree. She’s a cutie.
“That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”
Having lived in the great state of Texas for a few years.
I learned there ain’t no arguing with cowboy logic.
The human mind can be amazing.
And that’s a hot nerd girl.
“People forget that the brain is the biggest erogenous zone.”
Agreed. Some people are certainly dealt better hands in life than others.
Why isn’t infinite speed a solution? At infinite speed, your return trip time would be zero and you would have averaged 60.
I suppose you are now going to argue about the Special Theory of Relativity, C, And all those picayune annoyances.
True.
I used to be pretty good at math - I could even factor poly’s.
But never needing to do any of that stuff in my real life these trick ???”s elude me now.
Time for some brain games!
I think I’ll have a cocktail and go get at it!
Piccirillo’s proof appeared in Annals of Mathematics in February. The paper, combined with her other work, has secured her a tenure-track job offer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that will begin on July 1, only 14 months after she finished her doctorate.
That tells me that she and her accomplishment are pretty impressive.
Regardless of the distance you’d have to travel back at infinite speed to get a round trip average of 60mph. Since that clearly brings the problem into speeds faster than light you have to calculate a relativistic solution. The speed necessary would be impossible for an outside observer but for the driver he drives back at the speed of light, no time is lost to him and therefore he averages 60 mph for the whole trip according to his own clock.
Oh good it wasn't just me!
I too read the article and I didn't even understand the question much less the answer.
The lady is a smart cookie.
The Conway knot is not “slice.”
There is a video, scroll down to the photo/LINK. John Conway in 1990 explaining how in high school he showed why two knots can’t cancel each other out.
THe question of the Conway knot’s sliceness was famous not just because of how long it had gone unsolved. Slice knots give mathematicians a way to probe the strange nature of four-dimensional space, in which two-dimensional spheres can be knotted, sometimes in such crumpled ways that they can’t be smoothed out. Sliceness is “connected to some of the deepest questions in four-dimensional topology right now,” said Charles Livingston, an emeritus professor at Indiana University.
(30 + x) / 2 = 60
30 + x = 120
x = 90
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