Ilan Vardi
Hi everyone! My name is Ilan Vardi, and this is my website. You can also check out my old website, where I have most of my mathematics results. If you want to reach me, send mail to ilanpi@yahoo.com because I'd like to get to know you. My old address at IHES is out of date and my address ilanpi@mail.com doesn't seem to work to well.
I live in Paris with my wife Catherine and our dog Hedwige
and also our mascot Linux, who has his own blog now. In fact, he pretty much keeps everyone up to date on our family.
Yes, I am a mathematician, and I have written a number of mathematical papers.
I have also written books, the first one being Computational Recreations in Mathematica
The second one will appear soon: You Failed Your Math Test, Comrade Einstein. Actually, it is a collections of articles by a number of people (I only wrote the biggest part) which were edited by Mikhail Shifman. The subject is antisemitic mathematics in the former USSR.
I recently got another paper accepted in the American Math Monthly it's A geometric proof of Cavalieri's quadrature formula, my first article to fit on one page. Oops, for some reason, they changed their mind. Oh well, read it here then.
Most of my papers are "scholarly", but even if you're not too much into academics, you might be interested in such stuff as the legacy of Archimedes.
You can also check out the dark side of mathematics in a different type of paper which I wrote three years ago in a fit of frustration: Politics and Mathematics. That work is based in part on my study of antisemitic mathematics
If you know some mathematics then you might want to check out
if you understand what you know by
proving that pi exists. If you understand
why this is even an issue, then you are already doing OK. You can
then look at my proof that pi exists.
If you want to know more about Pi, check out
this video.
It was made shortly after I first saw
Pi
in person in August 1988, at Mammoth, California.
If you don't know anything about mathematics and would like to know what I think about it, I have written written a play called ``What is Mathematics?''. Actually it's in French: C'est quoi les maths ?
Latest Deep Thoughts
- Rediscover the history of cycling in the
Forgotten History of Paris Bicycles.
- French Hell.
- The Intelligence of Dogs.
Dumb & Dumber?
- More hurricane disinformation or how the media insists on distorting the figures.
- On our recent trip to the South, we were involved in the Rita exodus, which allowed us to experience first hand the disparity between reality and what is reported in the media. Read about Katrina and Rita disinformation.
- My pi proof makes it to USA Today in the Wonderquest column written by April Holladay.
- I was very unhappy by the complete acceptance by the French media of L'Equipe's accusation of Lance Armstrong. It seems to me that the French are very slow in defending a person's rights. In response, I wrote an article which I have titled J'accuse !, as well as an English version.
- After having read Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, I finally wrote up my ideas on wizard origins in the Harry Potter universe.
- What do 40 years of life experience add up to? Answer: I just realized today, May 27, 2004, that the name of the bard Assurancetourix in Asterix is a reference to "assurance tous risques" but for the last 40 years (exactly!) I had thought this was referring to "assurance touriste".
What do 25 years of life experience add up to? Answer: When I was about 10 years old, I was at a Passover celebration and upon leaving, noted that there was a lunar eclipse. Everyone, including myself, was amazed at this coincidence, what were the odds of an eclipse, and on Passover too! Well, when I was a man of 35, I became interested in elementary astronomy questions, and it occured to me that a lunar eclipse can only occur on a full moon, and that Passover, by definition, is on a full moon, since it falls on the 15th of Nissan, and the Jewish calendar months actually correspond to the phases of the moon (as opposed to the normal calendar whose months are totally meaningless). Therefore, I figured, the odds of a lunar eclipse are at least 10 times higher than for any other date.
What do 13 more years of life experience add up to? Answer: I find myself even wiser, since I now have at my disposal the power of the World Wide Web which has allowed me to discover that there were total lunar eclipses on the night of Passover in 1967 and 1968, as can be checked using this Nasa table and this Jewish Calendar conversion program. This goes to show that the odds of having a lunar eclipse on Passover are not at all shabby. Unfortunately, I have now forgotten which one of these I witnessed, which is the downside of 37 or 38 years of life experience.
- The Bewitched curse:
- Elizabeth Montgomery (Samantha): died age 62 of colorectal cancer.
- Dick York (Darrin #1): died age 63 of emphysema.
- Dick Sargent (Darrin #2): died age 64 of prostate cancer.
- Alice Pierce (Gladys Kravitz #1): died age 48 of ovarian cancer.
- Paul Lynde (Uncle Arthur): died age 55 of cardiac arrest due to extreme substance abuse.
To add to the mystery, there is the French version of the program known as "Ma Sorciere Bien Aimee". For reasons that remain unclear Darrin is renamed Jean-Pierre and Larry Tate becomes Alfred Tate.
- Harry Houdini's real name was Weiss, and he was played in the movie by Tony Curtis, whose real name was Schwartz.
Yo! Just published by the Internet Movie Data Base, see here.
This discovery finally enabled me to come to terms with my disillusionment when seeing the movie Wayne's World in 1992. They noted there that the first Darrin in Bewitched is Dick York the second is Dick Sargent, and then there is Sergeant York. I couldn't believe that I had all the information at my disposal for over 20 years but I never made the connection.
- Name for gay bar in the South of France = Homo Nimes.
- French Hell.
I am currently interested
in becoming MATHTER OF THE GAME.
That's why you may know me from from
Yahoo Dots, where play as
ilanpi.
I have written a
Dots page, which might help your
game. I also wrote up my deep thoughts about the game and
its relationship to mathematics.
When I was a kid, all I did was play Chess. This is me losing to
future grandmaster Kevin Spraggett in the final round of the 1975
Montreal Open (but hey, I tied for first).
These days, I am trying to
play Go. After a year (February 2004)
I have reached an "intermediate" level.
Speaking of Go books, I wrote a
review of the novel
La Joueuse de Go.
William Shubert's reference to nabbing
troublemakers led me to suspect that he is actually
an impostor and that his
real name is
Armin Tamzarian due to his obsession with
enforcing silly discipline.
But that is nothing compared to
Go Hell (click at your own risk!!).
I have since taken a break from Go and am now playing
the Korean game of Baduk.
On January 4, 2005, I finally reached 1 dan on the Korean server
Dashn .
Here is a Cyberoro game which was played on June 18, 2006.
I've heard that Linux is the best operating system and so the
best platform for playing Go. I've looked into this question,
see my Linux and Go page.
All of this inspired Catherine to write
The Mathta Rap and Linux to record
his
deep thoughts, where you can
hear him speak!!
Apart from that, my main interest for the last few decades has
been cycling, with some
very weird side effects (view at your own risk).
Last year, I had some experiences
trying to see the
arrival of the Tour de France. I also checked out the
arrival of the Grande Boucle Internationale, AKA
the Women's Tour de France.
Cycling in Paris pretty much sucks, so I have taken up
roller skating.
At my advanced age, it took me a long
time to
teach myself how to skate. You can also read about
my skates
Actually, I had to stop using those skates, because they didn't
give me enough support. I just got a new set of skates which are
much better and I've been enjoying skating again. You can
read about this skate
here.
Here I am with them in Hermosa Beach, California, September 2004.
Once, I tried out a Parisian group skate,
check out my story
Skates and Snails.
Watch out for those cobbles though! They are omnipresent
when you
learn to skate in Paris.
I like to hang out in Parisian cafes like the
Cafe de Flore. Here
is my buddy Bruno about to exercise his style on the nearest babes.
Otherwise you can find out more than you
would ever want to know about it on my
other web site
with its list of my deep thoughts on all types of topics.
For everything else see
foxycath.
Yes, Catherine is my wife of almost four years now, and we live in perfect
marital bliss in Paris with our virtual family,
Linux, Hedwig, Chilly Willy, and Jeanne.
On November 27, 2004, we adopted
Hedwige
a West Highland White Terrier. Read all about
her here. Here is Catherine holding her
for the first time
Catherine and I travel a lot. For example, we just took a trip to
Malta
I found "Little Wizard" in a discount shop in Valletta.
You may note the vague resemblance to Harry Potter, like the
glasses, robes, wand, and broom. But that's a complete
coincidence, the Harry Potter name
doesn't appear anywhere on the box. Speaking of which,
I later found myself in a recreation of Diagon Alley
That was on a recent trip to London, check
out the
pictures. Oh, and I am Canadian.
I have had some deep thoughts about the game of go, including how to
to deal with dirty books.
Amazingly, my
KGS rating has gone down since last February, but this consistent
with the
idiosyncratic nature of this server. I have now started playing
on the best server yet,
Cyberoro , which is also
based in Korea, but has 7 servers: 3 in Korea, 2 in China, 1 in Japan,
and 1 in Thailand.
Our latest adventure answers the question:
Is Paris nice? and will reveal who
is that
mysterious person
on his mobile phone talking behind that car. In 2005 returned
to the race with Hedwige
In 2005, we came back to the race, under much colder conditions
and with our dog Hedwige. See
this report.
