Sudoku’s french ancestors

This column is a place for those bits of contagious mathematics that travel from person to person in the community, because they are so elegant, suprising, or appealing that one has an urge to pass them on. Contributions are most welcome.     

Multiple Coverings of the Plane with Triangles

We prove that any 43-fold covering of the plane with translates of a triangle can be decomposed into two coverings.     

The uv-Decomposition on a Class of D.C. Functions and Optimality Conditions

In this paper,the UV-theory and P-differential calculus are employed to study second-order ex-pansion of a class of D.C.functions and minimization problems.Under certain conditions,some properties ofthe U-Lagrangian,the second-order expansion of this class of functions along some trajectories are formulated.Some first and second order optimality conditions for the class of D.C.optimization problems are given.     

Comment on “The Free Will Theorem”

In a recent paper Conway and Kochen, Found. Phys. 36, 2006, claim to have established that theories of the Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber (RW) type, i.e., of spontaneous wave function collapse, cannot be made relativistic. On the other hand, relativistic GRW-type theories have already been presented, in my recent paper, J. Stat. Phys. 125, 2006, and by Dowker and Henson, J. Stat. Phys. 115, 2004. Here, I elucidate why these are not excluded by the arguments of Conway and Kochen.      

How many black holes fit on the head of a pin?

The Bekenstein–Hawking entropy of certain black holes can be computed microscopically in string theory by mapping the elusive problem of counting microstates of a strongly gravitating black hole to the tractable problem of counting microstates of a weakly coupled D-brane system, which has no event horizon, and indeed comfortably fits on the head of a pin. We show here that, contrary to widely held beliefs, the entropy of spherically symmetric black holes can easily be dwarfed by that of stationary multi-black-hole “molecules” of the same total charge and energy. Thus, the corresponding pin-sized D-brane systems do not even approximately count the microstates of a single black hole, but rather those of a zoo of entropically dominant multicentered configurations. Fourth Award in the 2007 Essay Competition of the Gravity Research Foundation.     

Stability control of the electrooptic effect with new maleimide copolymers containing photoreactive tricyanopyrrolidene‐based chromophores

New photocrosslinkable maleimide copolymers have been synthesized by the attachment of a tricyanopyrrolidene‐based chromophore. The 2‐(3‐cyano‐4‐(2‐{4‐[hexyl‐(6‐hydroxy‐hexyl)‐amino]‐phenyl}‐vinyl)‐5‐oxo‐1‐{4‐[4‐(3‐oxo‐3‐phenyl‐propenyl)‐ phenoxy]‐butyl}‐1,5‐dihydro‐pyrrol‐2‐ylidene)‐malononitrile chromophore exhibits nonlinear optical activity and contains a chalcone moiety that is sensitive to UV light (λ = 330–360 nm) for crosslink formation. The maleimide monomers have also been functionalized with chalcone moieties. The resultant copolymers exhibit great processability, and one of them shows a maximum electrooptic coefficient of 90 pm/V at 1300 nm. We could control the thermal stability of the electrooptic coefficient with the newly synthesized photoreactive copolymers successfully. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part A: Polym Chem 45: 531–542, 2007