Algorithmics, Social choice, Market Design, and Other Topics

Congratulations to Iranian Maryam Mirzakhani from Stanford University who is the first woman to win the Fields Medal. Her Fields Medal citation includes the following: Maryam Mirzakhani has made striking and highly original contributions to geometry and dynamical systems. Her work on Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces bridges several mathematical disciplines—hyperbolic geometry, complex analysis, topology, and dynamics—and influences them all in return. She gained widespread recognition for her early results in hyperbolic geometry, and her most recent work constitutes a major advance in dynamical systems. Here's an interesting biographical profile on Maryam.

Pioneering mathematician Harold Kuhn has passed away this week . Kuhn was known for various contributions: Karush–Kuhn–Tucker conditions (for a solution in nonlinear programming to be optimal); Kuhn's theorem (that relates perfect recall, mixed and unmixed strategies and their expected payoffs); and the Hungarian method for computing the minimum cost perfect matching of a bipartite graph. I recall attending Kuhn's plenary lecture at EURO 2010 in Lisbon where he gave a charming talk about the history of the Hungarian method and the recent discovery of how Carl Gustav Jacobi had already solved the assignment problem in the 19th century. Kuhn gave a detailed history of the other figures such as Dénes Konig and Jenó Egerváry who all played their part in the development of ideas related to the Hungarian Method.

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.