Splash Biography

Disclaimer: This class is going to be interactive! How do markets work? Say I was trying to sell you a jar of biscuits for 25 dollars, but you didn't know how many biscuits were in there, would you buy it? What if there were 1000 people willing to buy it for 24? What if the only other person selling a jar of biscuits was selling it for 1000 dollars? In this interactive class, we will think about how markets work by playing a game called "tighten or trade". In particular, we will try to make markets on random trivia that we can estimate.

Maybe you read about something about Twitter being taken private? Something about FTX? What are FTT tokens anyway? What are the short sellers I am hearing about now? What do they do? In this class, we will go over the recent finance news. Disclaimer: I will not be giving financial advice. This class is purely for trying to understand what happened in the markets; not for designing an investment portfolio.

Note: This is a class I taught before; if you took this class before, I can supply new puzzles if you do take this class. Short summary: We will do puzzles as a group. Long summary: Suppose we give three people black and white hats by tossing a fair coin; then we ask individually what their hat color is. They can either guess it or pass. Now, how can you maximize your chances that one person gets the correct answer if we need to make sure that noone is wrong? One caveat: noone hears the other peoples' answer. What if we had 7 people? 255? How about the following: 10 people are lined up tallest the shortest on a line, and we ask from back to front what their hat color is; how can you ensure that at most one person gets their hat color incorrectly? What if we had 100 people? 1000? Maybe this puzzle? We have n people, and m possible colors for hats, and m < n; how can you make sure that at least one person guesses their hat color correctly? There are loads more puzzles (Alice and Bob are sending a suitcase to each other with padlocks; 100 prisoners in a room opening 50 boxes to find their number; the classic blue eyes-green eyes puzzle; the checkerboard puzzle; the last card trick of the game of SET), and each of these relies on various interesting branches of mathematics and computer science! (Abstract algebra, combinatorics, algorithms, information theory, probability, logic, random graph theory etc.) While we cannot hope to explore all of these puzzles to a sufficient depth (and the associated mathematical fields) in an hour, we can do a few of these to get a taste of some of the puzzles!

Suppose we give three people black and white hats by tossing a fair coin; then we ask individually what their hat color is. They can either guess it or pass. Now, how can you maximize your chances that one person gets the correct answer if we need to make sure that noone is wrong? One caveat: noone hears the other peoples' answer. What if we had 7 people? 255? How about the following: 10 people are lined up tallest the shortest on a line, and we ask from back to front what their hat color is; how can you ensure that at most one person gets their hat color incorrectly? What if we had 100 people? 1000? Maybe this puzzle? We have n people, and m possible colors for hats, and m < n; how can you make sure that at least one person guesses their hat color correctly? There are loads more puzzles (Alice and Bob are sending a suitcase to each other with padlocks; 100 prisoners in a room opening 50 boxes to find their number; the classic blue eyes-green eyes puzzle; the checkerboard puzzle; the last card trick of the game of SET), and each of these relies on various interesting branches of mathematics and computer science! (Abstract algebra, combinatorics, algorithms, information theory, probability, logic, random graph theory etc.) While we cannot hope to explore all of these puzzles to a sufficient depth (and the associated mathematical fields) in an hour, we can do a few of these to get a taste of some of the puzzles!

Disclaimer: This class is going to be interactive! How do markets work? Say I was trying to sell you a jar of biscuits for 25 dollars, but you didn't know how many biscuits were in there, would you buy it? What if there were 1000 people willing to buy it for 24? What if the only other person selling a jar of biscuits was selling it for 1000 dollars? In this interactive class, we will think about how markets work by playing a game called "tighten or trade". In particular, we will try to make markets on random trivia that we can estimate.

Markets have failed quite a few times in out society, ranging from the mortgage crisis, or when oil went negative, or the relatively recent Luna crash. In this class, we will go over what happened in these various instances where markets did not accurately reflect the demand for the various assets.

Suppose we give three people black and white hats by tossing a fair coin; then we ask individually what their hat color is. They can either guess it or pass. Now, how can you maximize your chances that one person gets the correct answer if we need to make sure that noone is wrong? One caveat: noone hears the other peoples' answer. What if we had 7 people? 255? How about the following: 10 people are lined up tallest the shortest on a line, and we ask from back to front what their hat color is; how can you ensure that at most one person gets their hat color incorrectly? What if we had 100 people? 1000? Maybe this puzzle? We have n people, and m possible colors for hats, and m < n; how can you make sure that at least one person guesses their hat color correctly? There are loads more puzzles (Alice and Bob are sending a suitcase to each other with padlocks; 100 prisoners in a room opening 50 boxes to find their number; the classic blue eyes-green eyes puzzle; the checkerboard puzzle; the last card trick of the game of SET), and each of these relies on various interesting branches of mathematics and computer science! (Abstract algebra, combinatorics, algorithms, information theory, probability, logic, random graph theory etc.) While we cannot hope to explore all of these puzzles to a sufficient depth (and the associated mathematical fields) in an hour, we can do a few of these to get a taste of some of the puzzles!

How do ideas spread in a society? How do people agree to cooperate when they are incentivized not to? Why are some societies more segregated than others? Society around us is not a mathematics problem, but branches of math (such as game theory and graph theory) can help understand s lot of complex phenomena such as various societal patterns and behaviors of financial institutions. This class will explore some of the societal phenomena through Nicky Case's interactive simulations (which can be found on ncase.me). If we have time, we will also simulate some of the situations amongst each other to see the emergence of some of this behavior.

Suppose we give three people black and white hats by tossing a fair coin; then we ask individually what their hat color is. They can either guess it or pass. Now, how can you maximize your chances that one person gets the correct answer if we need to make sure that noone is wrong? One caveat: noone hears the other peoples' answer. What if we had 7 people? 255? How about the following: 10 people are lined up tallest the shortest on a line, and we ask from back to front what their hat color is; how can you ensure that at most one person gets their hat color incorrectly? What if we had 100 people? 1000? Maybe this puzzle? We have n people, and m possible colors for hats, and m < n; how can you make sure that at least one person guesses their hat color correctly? There are loads more puzzles (Alice and Bob are sending a suitcase to each other with padlocks; 100 prisoners in a room opening 50 boxes to find their number; the classic blue eyes-green eyes puzzle; the checkerboard puzzle; the last card trick of the game of SET), and each of these relies on various interesting branches of mathematics and computer science! (Abstract algebra, combinatorics, algorithms, information theory, probability, logic, random graph theory etc.) While we cannot hope to explore all of these puzzles to a sufficient depth (and the associated mathematical fields) in an hour, we can do a few of these to get a taste of some of the puzzles!

We'll talk about what puzzle hunts are, look at examples of puzzles and common solving techniques, and then try solving puzzles together!

Suppose we give three people black and white hats by tossing a fair coin; then we ask individually what their hat color is. They can either guess it or pass. Now, how can you maximize your chances that one person gets the correct answer if we need to make sure that noone is wrong? One caveat: noone hears the other peoples' answer. What if we had 7 people? 255? How about the following: 10 people are lined up tallest the shortest on a line, and we ask from back to front what their hat color is; how can you ensure that at most one person gets their hat color correctly? What if we had 100 people? 1000? Maybe this puzzle? We have n people, and m possible colors for hats, and m < n; how can you make sure that at least one person guesses their hat color correctly? There are loads more puzzles (Alice and Bob are sending a suitcase to each other with padlocks; 100 prisoners in a room opening 50 boxes to find their number; the classic blue eyes-green eyes puzzle; the checkerboard puzzle; the last card trick of the game of SET), and each of these relies on various interesting branches of mathematics and computer science! (Abstract algebra, combinatorics, algorithms, information theory, probability, logic, random graph theory etc.) While we cannot hope to explore all of these puzzles to a sufficient depth (and the associated mathematical fields) in an hour, we can do a few of these to get a taste of some of the puzzles!

We'll talk about what puzzle hunts are, look at examples of puzzles and common solving techniques, and then try solving puzzles together! We can also talk about how to write your own puzzles!