Election day tidbits
1) The name of the person whose phone number is 2^31 is Will. I know this because we called him today and Ben left a message saying that he was calling as part of a Get Out the Vote effort to remind him to vote today, November 9th [sic], and that by the way, his phone number was 2^31. Best prank call ever. Adam says there's a proof that you can find a power of two that begins with any string of digits you want. (Well, okay, it exists...whether you can find it is another question!) He then said it would work with any base relatively prime to 10...but now that I think about it, two is not relatively prime to 10...hmm. Anyway that's pretty cool. Although I still find the fact that somewhere in pi (or any other irrational number) is any string of digits you could want more elegant.
2) Our number theory professor offered a challenge to reform elections using number theory in basically the following way: If we could make voting results public in such a way that anyone reading a list of results could recognize their own vote and make sure it was recorded correctly, but no one could map other people to their votes, then they could be published in newspapers and online and people could check and doublecheck for themselves. That way any mass of people who didn't find their votes counted and recorded correctly could immediately speak up, and anyone who wanted to put the effort in could easily doublecheck the tallying of votes, so election fraud would become a lot harder to successfully perpetrate. The number theory comes into play in trying to find a way to label the ballots so that any given person can recognize his or her ballot, but no one else can link them to it, and no one can prove they're lying if they say it's something else. That way voting remains private. So that's the challenge. I don't have any ideas how to solve it yet.
And now, time to do absolutely nothing for an hour and a half, before doing things for five hours straight. Blah.
I hope I can find a TV on campus that gets Comedy Central!
2) Our number theory professor offered a challenge to reform elections using number theory in basically the following way: If we could make voting results public in such a way that anyone reading a list of results could recognize their own vote and make sure it was recorded correctly, but no one could map other people to their votes, then they could be published in newspapers and online and people could check and doublecheck for themselves. That way any mass of people who didn't find their votes counted and recorded correctly could immediately speak up, and anyone who wanted to put the effort in could easily doublecheck the tallying of votes, so election fraud would become a lot harder to successfully perpetrate. The number theory comes into play in trying to find a way to label the ballots so that any given person can recognize his or her ballot, but no one else can link them to it, and no one can prove they're lying if they say it's something else. That way voting remains private. So that's the challenge. I don't have any ideas how to solve it yet.
And now, time to do absolutely nothing for an hour and a half, before doing things for five hours straight. Blah.
I hope I can find a TV on campus that gets Comedy Central!
posted by Ashila at 2:15 PM
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