Sunday, May 15, 2022

Is Kamala Harris our first female PREZ? No. Do I have a theorem named after me. No. But in both cases...

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!) 





2 comments:

  1. Perhaps the Kruskal Three Theorem is a typo? Tree?

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    Replies
    1. Fixed. Here is hoping that one day there IS a Kruskal Three Theorem!

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