Marianne Freiberger

Should we let go of the "one person, one vote" principle?

How stupid systems can use clever ways of finding things.

Forecasting election results is a sophisticated business.

Why a perfect voting system is mathematically impossible.

Latest observations hint towards new particles.

How crinkly is crinkly?

Will computers ever replace human mathematicians?

There's been progress on one of the biggest open problems in maths: the twin prime conjecture.

If I tell you that it's Monday today, then you know it's not any of the other six days of the week. Perhaps the information content of my statement should be measured in terms of the number of all the other possibilities it excludes? Back in the 1920s this consideration led to a very simple formula to measure information.

Kolmogorov complexity gives a high value to strings of symbols that are essentially random. But isn't randomness essentially meaningless? Should a measure of information assign a low value to it? The concept of sophistication addresses this question.