Orr Shalit's blog
A couple of weeks ago I attended the 30th International Conference in Operator Theory, that took place at West University in Timisoara, Romania. This is a longstanding series of conferences in operator theory and related fields that takes place every other year in Romania which has been traditionally a powerhouse in operator theory (Stratila, Voiculescu, [ ]
Yesterday, Marcel Scherer (a postdoc in our group here at the Technion) published his new exciting preprint A Three-Dimensional Operator System without the Smith–Ward Property . This paper contains a solution, in the negative, to the long-standing Smith-Ward problem. This is exciting news, since this problem is open since 1980 and has resisted the attacks of [ ]
Last week Ian Thompson published an exciting preprint on the arxiv: On the universal commuting dilation constant . The preprint contains great improvements to both upper and lower known bounds to the universal commuting dilation constant and in particular it resolves an open problem that I asked together with my collaborators, whether for the case is [ ]
Marcel Scherer, Eli Shamovich and I have recently uploaded to the arxiv our new paper On the spectral radius of operator tuples . In this paper we study the spectral radius function which is associated with an operator space . This notion of spectral radius was introduced rather recently in a paper of Shamovich and me [ ]
I have recently seriously written on The Unreasonable Flakiness of Assessment in the Mathematical Sciences , and today I want to look at our flaky business from another angle. I am not going to put my hand all the way into the fire, but still I want to touch it. Any mathematician I know is overloaded [ ]
Following up on my commitment from the last post, I am coming back with a final report of the Brown s Philosophy of Mathematics: A Contemporary Introduction to the World of Proofs and Pictures. I wrote midway through the book that I recommend it, because I felt that by reading it I was working myself up [ ]
Is there any better escape from reality than mathematics? Sure there is: philosophy of mathematics. I am reading Philosophy of Mathematics: A Contemporary Introduction to the Worlds of Proofs and Pictures by James Robert Brown. The book advocates a flavor of a Platonistic philosophy of math. A feature of the book is an argument for [ ]
Of course, this is a rant. You can tell by the title. But, for the record, let me be forward that I don t have an idea how to solve the problem that I will be lamenting, nor do I think that I am doing a better job than everyone else at assessing mathematics done by [ ]
This document contains some excerpts from Part B2 of my ERC grant proposal. The area of NC function theory is not as widely recognized as some other areas competing for grants, I therefore thought that it would be interesting for some readers if I told the mathematical story of how I was led to enter [ ]
In a recent academic assembly a colleague said something along the lines of the AI revolution is imminent, we must act quickly or we will be left behind which together with the incoherent clamor coming from all directions (ministry of education, university administration, colleagues, students, social media) has led me to realize the [ ]