Doron Zeilberger gives the best reasons I’ve seen for eschewing Powerpoint in favour of whiteboard talks. His reasons are pretty pertinent for detailed technical seminars where you want to understand ideas in detail. I still think Powerpoint has a place when you’re just trying to communicate the gist of your results, as is often the case in conference talks, and a higher baud rate is appropriate.
Month: June 2004
Chalabi numbers
Lots of people (including yours truly) love to brag about their Erdos numbers. My colleague Steve Flammia wrote to the people at the
Erdos number project asking them if they had computed the Erdos numbers for infamous people. Steve asked specifically about Ahmed Chalabi, who has a PhD in mathematics.
Turns out Chalabi has an Erdos number of at most six!
Which means my Chalabi number is at most eight…
Standards
The Princeton Math Department’s Graduate Students’ Guide to Generals is pretty interesting. They don’t exactly give them an easy time, and the list of examiners is pretty scary (Conway, Wiles and Fefferman in one case!)