Donnerstag, 15.7.1999
"Ganzzahlige Folgen, für welche |A(n)*A(n)-A(n+1)*A(n-1)| beschränkt bleibt"
10:00 h---W9-109
Es wird mit ganz elementaren Mitteln gezeigt, dass eine ganzzahlige Folge A(n), fuer welche |A(n)*A(n)-A(n+1)*A(n-1)|, aber nicht |A(n)| beschraenkt bleibt, entweder schliesslich arithmetisch, geometrisch oder vom Typ einer Fibonacci-Folge ist, und es werden eine Reihe weiterer, durch diese Beobachtung veranlasster Fragestellungen diskutiert.
"The Bible Code : Fact or Fallacy"
The talk will be aimed at a general audience.
18:00 h---H 8
Over the centuries, many claims have been made of patterns of miraculous nature hidden within the text of sacred writings. Jewish, Christian and Islamic scriptures are included, as well as others. Usually the patterns involve counting of letters and words, or calculations involving numerical equivalents of the letters.
Until recently, all such claims were made by people without mathematical qualifications and were easily disproved. However, in 1994, an Israeli mathematician Ilya Rips and two others published a paper in the respectable journal Statistical Science that information about medieval Jewish sages was encoded in the Hebrew text of the Book of Genesis (written millennia before).
The paper in Statistical Science has spawned a huge "Bible Codes" industry, complete with best selling books, TV documentaries, and soon a movie. However, no adequate refutation has been published in the academic literature.
We will discuss the claims in depth, concentrating on the efforts of scientists and Bible scholars in Israel, the USA, and Australia, to get to the bottom of the matter.
"Generating representatives of isomorphism classes"
10:00 h---W9-109
We discuss the problem of explicitly generating representatives of the isomorphism classes of combinatorial objects, with emphasis on objects (such as graphs) for which the isomorphism problem is nontrivial. The methods we describe include one that has proved to be extremely general in its applicability.