Soccer Dad

I musta got lost

An Israeli professor solved a problem that has been bothering mathematicians for nearly 40 years.
Trakhtman solved the "Road Coloring Problem," which was raised by Israeli mathematics Prof. Binyamin Weiss and others in 1970. There are many forms but the most popular one among experts goes like this:

A man reaches a town he has never visited before and drives around trying to find the home of his friend even though there are no street names. The friend says not to worry and that he will provide instructions (left, right, left...) on how to get there.

This is called synchronizing instruction. The problem is whether by using such instructions, the driver could reach his destination no matter where he was lost, said Prof. Stuart Margolis, a colleague and mentor of Trakhtman who made aliya from the US and joined Bar-Ilan the same year as the Russian mathematician.

"He is brilliant with a high IQ," Margolis told The Jerusalem Post. "It's God-given gray matter in his brain. He is shy, reserved and very modest. He intentionally offered his paper to an Israeli journal even though any mathematics journal in the world would be overjoyed to get it. Now he's working on a real algorithm to implement his solution."

What's the most remarkable part of the story?

A 63-year-old mathematics professor at Bar-Ilan University, who worked as a guard for about five years after his aliya from the former Soviet Union in 1990, has solved an abstract math problem that has befuddled experts for the last 38 years.

He started over again in the middle of his life and now has achieved fame in his field.

I'm guessing that something like this would apply to Rubik's cube.

Crossposted on Yourish.

israel, mathematics.