HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Numberphile has a good video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KboGyIilP6k

⬐ te

While I had no name recognition of this brilliant theorist, turns out he is the same guy that wrote Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays (recommended). Also found this sad news: https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/04/18/elwyn-berlekamp-game-th...

⬐ herodotus

Elwyn Berlekamp wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elwyn_Berlekamp He died in April this year.

⬐ farnasirim

I won a dots and box bot competition years ago with this: https://github.com/farnasirim/dots-and-lines-box. You can try it out in the terminal as easy as `g++ decision.cpp && ./a.out` and try the technique in the video in a 4x4 instance of the game against the bot. It plays fine in general, but I had not heard about the trick for the 4x4 case (outlined in the video) back then, so it doesn't support it.

There are people who come into your life and change it for the better. Elwyn did that for me as a mentor, an investor and a teacher. We regularly had lunch near his office in Rockridge to discuss math and clinical trials, a particular shared interest of ours.

Elwyn spent a lot of time at MSRI and this Numberphile video captures him doing something he loved: playing mathematical games. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KboGyIilP6k

Elwyn came from Kentucky and KET, the PBS affiliate there, did a really nice retrospective on his life and work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHotBRJW4-0

Thanks for everything Elwyn.

⬐ mjfl

what sort of clinical trials?

⬐ jchallis

Elwyn was very active in bringing pulmonary fibrosis medications to patients, spending substantial amounts of his own time and money. From that experience, he was interested in how novel clinical trial designs could assess the effectiveness of therapies faster for patients while controlling for bias and luck.