Students and Robots

Last year Zhirayr Avetisyan and I created a math riddle about the games cops and robbers. It was part of an outreach event to high-school student at Ghent University. You can find it in this post here. The story was that a group of mathematicians wants to walk around the city of Ghent and have fun, while a group of bureaucrats wants to destroy that fun.

1. The New Version for SUSTech

This year I was asked to make a riddle for Pi Day at my new university, the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in Shenzhen, China. Now I was asked very short notice, so I simply wanted to re-use last year’s riddle. There were two problems: (1) I can hardly use a city map of Ghent for a riddle at a university in Shenzhen. (2) In Belgium or Germany most civil servants and bureaucrats do not mind when people make fun of them. Indeed, I probably know all my civil servant jokes from civil servants (E.g.: Two civil servants meet in the hallway. One speak: “Oh! You cannot sleep either?”). Even though China is probably the most bureaucratic country which I have ever lived in (and I have lived in Germany, obviously), this is serious business and the story had to be replaced. The responsible secretary come up with a very cute story: A robot escaped from the robotics lab and students have to catch it again.

Here is the map of SUSTech’s campus:

Refereeing

The work of mathematicians goes through peer-review which contributes to the acceptance of the correctness of our work. Peer-reviewers are of course peers, that is other mathematicians, and most of us consider this work important.

At least two of my colleagues complain about how much they have to referee and (they claim) give my name as an alternative peer-reviewer (instead of doing it themselves). As it is the end of the year, here the number of referee requests which I accepted in my life by year of acceptance. Note that 2015 might include 2013 and 2014. I know that many colleagues review far more papers than I do, but for certain not all of them and, hence, I hope that the chart below discourages some of my colleagues from recommending me as an alternative referee.

[This year I was not even a good referee as I lost track of some of my commitments which I agreed to during my move to China.]

Post-Doc Positions at SUSTech, Shenzhen

This is not a proper “I have jobs! Please apply!” post, but more a general service announcement. It is my understanding that I can essentially have up to two post-docs here at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in Shenzhen without having to worry about funding too much. Shenzhen is one of the most prosperous cities of China. It is located next to Hong Kong, maybe 20 minutes by high-speed rail Well-known companies such as Huawei, Tencent, and BYD are based in Shenzhen. The mathematics department has a strong combinatorics and algebra group, including (in no particular ordering) Qing Xiang, Ziqing Xiang, Caiheng Li, Efim Zelmanov, and Vyacheslav Futorny.

There is some process and formal application process involved which I do not yet understand too much, but I assume that it is not difficult. I had postdoc positions in Belgium, Canada, Germany, and Israel. The salary of a postdoc in Shenzhen is comparable to these. I also talked to several current and former postdocs at SUSTech. They all seem to be happy with their working conditions.

Now why am I writing this? If anyone considers doing a postdoc with me, then write me an e-mail and I can figure out details. So this post tells you about this option. Of course you should work in an area which is sufficiently close to my research. Anything in finite geometry, algebraic combinatorics, or those parts of coding theory and extremal combinatorics which I like are good.

I also seem to have 0.5 PhD positions per year. My current impression is that it is probably not advisable for non-Chinese and that the salaries are not competitive with those in Belgium, Canada or Germany (my current points of reference, see above). Everyone is also very welcome to ask me about that.

Move to China & Blog Picture & Data Storage

Let me start with a small service announcement. In November I am taking up a position as an tenure-track assistant at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen. At least if everything goes well. Airplanes can crash or I could fail the medical examination. The date of my flight is easy to remember. So here is that. People no longer have to ask me.

Then I recently figured out how to make polls, so let me do another one. I started this blog in 2017 when I was a postdoc of Gil Kalai in Jerusalem. Just a few days prior to my first post I visited the Mount of Olives with my housemate Agata, her husband, and my girlfriend/partner at the time. A picture from there became the banner picture of this blog. Now I moved from Israel to Belgium around January/February 2018, so maybe I should change it at some point. But to what? Something in Shenzhen? They have fancy buildings there (just not that old as the city is from 1979, slightly younger than Jerusalem):

But maybe something math-related would be more appropriate. This would require some thinking on my part. Surely, feasible. In any case, here is a poll. I will not implement any change soon (it took me months to write this post).

My next post, whenever that will be, is again about some math. Or maybe about moving my strongly regular graph data to a better place. People tell me that Zenodo might be good option. It even gives your data a DOI and, probably, CERN will exist for quite some time. Let’s see …