On Nov 19, 2021 Joe Biden got a colonoscopy and hence the 25th amendment was used to make Kamala Harris the president temporarily (this source: here says 85 minutes, though I thought I heard a few hours from other sources).
Does this make Kamala Harris our first female president?
I would say NO and I suspect you agree. A friend of mine suggested the phrasing Kamala Harris is the first women to assume the powers of the president under the 25th amendment. True. I don't think it means much. She tacked on the under the 25th amendment since Edith Wilson was essentially president when Woodrow Wilson had a stroke (see here).
A student asked me Is there a theorem that is referred to as Gasarch's Theorem or something like that?
I will answer YES and NO, but really the answer is NO.
YES: In 1999 Gasarch and Kruskal had a paper in Mathematics Magazine:
When can one load of Dice so that the sum is uniformly distributed?
In that paper we have a theorem that gives an exact condition on
(n_1,...,n_k) for when there is a loaded n_1-sided dice, n_2-sided dice,...,n_k-sided dice so that
the sums are all equally likely.
In 2018 Ian Morrison published a paper in the American Math Monthly:
Sacks of dice with fair totals
which used our work and referred to our main theorem as The Gasarch-Kruskal Theorem.
Hence there is a theorem with my name on it!
NO: The Gasarch-Kruskal paper has only 8 citations (according to Google Scholar). This is more than I would have thought, but its not a lot. The fact that ONE person calls the main theorem THE GASARCH-KRUSKAL THEOREM hardly makes it a named theorem.
QUESTION: So what criteria can one use?
We could say that X has a theorem with their name on it if there is a Wikipedia entry about the theorem, using that name. That works to a point, but might fun afoul of Goodhart's law (if a measure becomes a target it stops being a measure) in that, for example, I could write a Wikipedia entry on The Gasarch-Kruskal Theorem.
We could say that 10 people need to refer to the theorem by the name of its authors. Why 10? Any number seems arbitrary.
CAVEAT: If someone asked Clyde Kruskal is there a theorem that bears your name that is trickier, since The Kruskal Tree Theorem bears his name.... but its not his theorem. Reminds me of the (fictional) scenario where a Alice steals a Field's medal and tells Bob I have a Field's Medal! and Bob thinks Alice is a world-class mathematician since she has a fields medal, rather than thinking Alice is a world class thief. See here for my post on that.
(I originally had Kruskal Three Theorem instead of Tree Theorem. I have corrected this but I hope it inspires Clyde to prove a theorem about the number Three so he can have a named theorem. And if he is lucky, over time, people will confuse it with the Kruskal Tree Theorem!)
Perhaps the Kruskal Three Theorem is a typo? Tree?
ReplyDeleteFixed. Here is hoping that one day there IS a Kruskal Three Theorem!
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