The Curious Engineer

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Igor Pak's blog

igorpak.wordpress.com

Views on life and math

Math

’15’20’25
Posts
61 from 16 Mar 2012 to 25 Sep 2026
Posting
now and then (2 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
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2026 2

  1. How to make small improvements and break barriers
  2. What to expect in the AI era

2024 6

  1. On faith, religion, conjectures and Schubert calculus
  2. Concise functions and spanning trees
  3. Princeton President to Princeton Jews: For the sake of free speech please shut up!
  4. The bunkbed conjecture is false
  5. We deserve better journals
  6. Two constructions

2023 2

  1. The power of negative thinking: Combinatorial and geometric inequalities
  2. The journal hall of shame

2022 6

  1. Innovation anxiety
  2. How to start a paper?
  3. What to publish?
  4. How I chose Enumerative Combinatorics
  5. Are we united in anything?
  6. The insidious corruption of open access publishers

2021 9

  1. Just when you think it’s over
  2. The problem with combinatorics textbooks
  3. How to fight the university bureaucracy and survive
  4. Why you shouldn’t be too pessimistic
  5. The Unity of Combinatorics
  6. 2021 Abel Prize
  7. My interview
  8. How to tell a good mathematical story
  9. What math stories to tell and not to tell?

2020 4

  1. It could have been worse! Academic lessons of 2020
  2. What if they are all wrong?
  3. Take an interview!
  4. The guest publishing scam

2019 5

  1. How Combinatorics became legitimate (according to László Lovász and Endre Szemerédi)
  2. Some good news
  3. What if math dies?
  4. Just combinatorics matters
  5. The status quo of math publishing

2018 2

  1. What we’ve got here is failure to communicate
  2. ICM Paper

2017 2

  1. How to write math papers clearly
  2. ICM 2018 Speakers

2016 2

  1. Fibonacci times Euler
  2. You say goodbye and I say hello

2015 2

  1. The power of negative thinking, part I. Pattern avoidance
  2. You should watch combinatorics videos!

2014 3

  1. Grading Gian-Carlo Rota’s predictions
  2. How NOT to reference papers
  3. Who named Catalan numbers?

2013 7

  1. Mathematician’s guide to holidays
  2. How many graduate students do we need?
  3. Academia is nothing like a drug cartel
  4. Combinatorial briefs
  5. What do math journals do? What will become of them in the future?
  6. What is Combinatorics?
  7. Who computed Catalan numbers?

2012 9

  1. College admissions II. What’s the hurry? Waste a year!
  2. College admissions I. Discrimination and lies, Jews and Harvard
  3. Admission blues: How to fix GRE Mathematics and tweak the Putnam Competition
  4. What’s the Matter with Hertz Foundation?
  5. On triple crowns in mathematics and AMS badges
  6. How do you solve a problem like the Annals?
  7. Computational combinatorics
  8. A lost bijection
  9. Britannica, Wikipedia and Combinatorics