Linkage

Erdős’s legacy of cash prizes for problem solutions. Sadly, Suk’s breakthrough on the happy ending problem doesn’t win the $500 prize still available for that one.

Buckets of fish! Joel David Hamkins describes a cute combinatorial game that always eventually terminates, despite the players’ ability to make games arbitrarily long. It has an infinite game tree, but there’s a simple trick that makes its strategy easy.

MathJax font matching and pairing. A tool for making sure your MathJax fonts look good against your main text fonts.

Europeans propose end-to-end encryption for all. With bonus ban on backdoors.

No, this is not a circle (G+). Zoltán Kovács’s paper can also explain why this string art triforce does not depict a Reuleaux triangle.

Origami anything (G+). Erik Demaine and Tomohiro Tachi show how to fold any 3d shape from a single sheet of paper, in a new SoCG paper on their Origamizer software.

1st Symposium on Simplicity in Algorithms (G+) I’m curious how this comes out, but this has to be an improvement on the current top theory conferences’ focus only on algorithms that are difficult and complicated and avoid taking advantage of any known techniques.

15 years after Minority Report: We’re entering the dystopia (G+). Suresh gets extensively quoted by CNN for his warnings about using unexplainable automated methods to make legal judgements.

Wikimedia vs NSA. The question appears to be whether the NSA has the right to comb through all traffic through Wikipedia’s service provider.

Topographical topology at Arches National Park (G+). Henry Segerman points out the nontrivial topology of the earth’s surface (and its complement the air) but asks whether there exists a place where they are not both handlebodies.

The group theory of Brio (G+). Or, how to tell whether your track actually meets back up to form a smooth closed loop.

2d vector animation on the web is currently dead (G+). Sariel puts his finger on a serious gap in web graphics standards.

ALENEX 2018. The call for papers is out. Submit your experimental algorithms work by August 11 (abstract; full papers one week later).