Distinguished Lecture
Being a Nobel Prize Laureate gives you some advantages. For example, you can be late for your own lecture by half an hour and everybody in the audience will wait. There are even wierder prerogatives: you can, for example, use old-style hand-written slides on ancient projectors that should have retired instead of fancy computerized presentations: still, everybody would listen intently. I did. Yesterday. Together with many mathematicians and academic staff.
The Nobelist I heard yesterday is Prof. Aumann, the mathematician from Jerusalem. I heard him almost by accident: I happened to be at the Technion for some business, and saw ads inviting the public for his lecture. Well, even as an undergraduate student (which is not the normal target audience of such lectures) I liked these events, and I sort of jumped on the opportunity: it’s not every day now that I can hear intelligent people talking about interesting things that they did.
Aumann didn’t fail. He was very theatrical, and explained a bit about the work that gave him the nobel. The title was “strategic information theory: repeated games with incomplete information”. He didn’t get too technical, but gave the background to the work, demonstrated some basic casess and postulated his results. The background, in particular, was pretty funny: it goes back to the 1960s, when the USA and the USSR held the so-called Geneva Talks about nuclear disarming: it was a series of annual talks, in which both superpowers tried to convince each other to disarm some of their nuclear weapons without revealing how many weapons they actually have. Aumann, apparently, consulted to the USA how to negotiate in these talks - a task for which he developed his theory (which deals with a series of repeated games, rather then a single game).
Roughly, he says, sometimes you should not use all the information you have (for example, don’t tell your representative to the talks how many weapons his own side actually possess), because in the long run it may hurt you. He used some technical ways to prove it, but overall in some cases it is better to hint your man or even leave him blind then to tell him what he’s doing: in the long run, it will work for you. It may sound somewhat intuitive, but proving it (and showing just how much it will worth you, and in which cases, and other messy details) is a Nobel work, as it turned out.
This lecture was just the peak of a very good day I had at the Technion. They held there this “open day”, which was full of interesting talks and lectures. I went there eventhough I am still cold (I have been at home with the flew for the entire week, and am still sick right now) and despite the stormy weather; but I’m really glad I did - it reminded me again just how much I enjoy being in the Technion, which is a very decent academic institute. By the way: they changed the campus quite a bit since I studied there. New buildings are everywhere, the labs that I visited seem well equipped, and overall it looks in good shape - not that I can judge from such an occasional visit.
The Technion visit, like I mentioned, was a good break in a week of being-sick-at-home. I spend this week mainly sleeping, and reading a bit - not too much to tell about (besides heaps of chicken soup); I even cancelled tickets to a show me and Elina planned to see two days ago. I hope that the next show, due for tommorow night, will not be cancelled - I was sick enough for one season, and I feel it’s high time to heal up.
