Algorithmics, Social choice, Market Design, and Other Topics

Cake cutting started off as a topic of mathematical curiosity but has become a full-fledged topic within the field of " fair division " because of its ability to abstractly capture settings in which a heterogeneous divisible good is to be allocated among multiple people. The main goal is to identify methods to cut the cake that are as fair and welfare maximizing as possible. The field originated in the 1940's due to to work of Polish mathematicians Steinhaus, Knaster & Banach. Recently, a video has been doing the rounds that suggests that a formal study of cake cutting dates even earlier than the 1940's. The video discusses a Nature letter by Francis Galton dated 1906 regarding the optimal method to cut the cake so as to minimize the exposed surface that may become dry. For those who are interested to see Galton's actual letter, here it is:

Location: Room B424 , Level 4, ‘B Block’, UTS Business School 1-59 Quay Street, Haymarket, Sydney, Australia July 24, 2014  (9am - 4:30pm) Roy Green, Dean of the UTS Business School. Welcome John Ledyard (California Institute of Technology) “A Simple Buy‐back Auction for Fisheries Management” with Guillerme Freitas and Theodore Groves  Leslie M. Marx (Duke University) “Equilibrium Bid Strategies in an Auction with Bidder Preferences and Resale” with Simon Loertscher Jun Zhang (University of Technology, Sydney) “Information Disclosure In Contests: A Bayesian Persuasion Approach” with Junjie Zhou Murali Agastya (University of Sydney) “On Efficient Partnership Dissolution” with Oleksii Birulin Paul Pezanis ‐ Christou (University of Adelaide)  “Supply information policies in sequential and simultaneous high‐bid auctions” with Nobuyuki Hanaki and Tibor Neugebaeur Tom Wilkening (University of Melbourne) “A Long Way Comi...

Adelaide-born genius Terrence Tao gets another feather in his cap with the  $US 3 million Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics . Having already won the Fields Medal in 2006, The Abel prize seems to be the only prize eluding Tao.  [Hat tip to Felix Brandt]

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jun/20/game-theory-life-qanta-magazine

Here's a touching story on Australia's first kidney swap operation . And here's the behind the scene mathematics behind how kidney exchange clearing houses work.

Jean-François Laslier and his colleagues are undertaking an interesting online experiment to compare different electoral systems for selecting members of the European Parliament. The project is called EuroVote+ and allows online participants to vote via different electoral systems. The goal is to understand the following questions: Does the electoral system have an impact on who gets elected?  Are the different systems really different?  Is there a better system? [Hat tip to Felix Brandt ]

Balanced knockout tournaments are one of the most common formats for sports competitions, and are also used in elections and decision-making. Such tournaments can be represented by a balanced binary tree in which the leaves correspond to the players. A balanced knockout tournament is conducted in the following fashion. Players that correspond to sibling leaf nodes play a match against each other. The winner of the match proceeds up the tree to the next round. The winner of the balanced knockout tournaments is the player who reaches the root node. Example 1 : One of the balanced knockout tournament of which I have fond memories is the one on four teams that represents the semi finals and final of the 1992 cricket world cup. South Africa and New Zealand who lost their respective semi-finals were eliminated whereas Pakistan and England contested the final in Melbourne. It has long been observed that the draw (the way players/teams are paired up) of a balanced knockout tourna...