From: Jonathan Farley To: "Jeffrey E." <[email protected]> Subject: lattice theory and applications / Hollywood actress Danica McKellar promotes my work Date: Sat, 16 Dec 2017 19:49:52 +0000 Attachments: Universal_Algebra_meets_Actuarial_Science.pdf; RNA_Matrix3.pdf Inline-Images: image.png Hi, Thanks for taking the time to Skype. I just want to emphasize what Ms. Bandpey has done regarding counterterrorism. Let b be a positive integer. She proved a conjecture about finite partially ordered sets P with a top element such that no element has more than b lower covers: which one has the fewest cutsets? Vasek Chvatal and three computer scientists at McGill University proved a special case of the conjecture, for trees. They heard the question in a talk I gave at McGill in 2007, but in that same talk I also posed the question that Ms. Bandpey answered last year. Vasek Chvatal is a highly respected combinatorialist. The chairman of Stanford University's Computer Science Department once called Chvatal "one of the two best young combinatorialists in the world". https://exhibits.stanford.eduffeigenbaumicatalogibp674pb4626 The U.S. Army gave me a grant of $20,000 to write a monograph on this topic. Here is Vaughan Pratt, professor of computer science at Stanford University, discussing with me something related to the problem I mentioned to you today: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/univalg/conversations/messages/866 He was so intrigued by the problem, he wrote up 50 pages of notes! At the top of page 276 of this next paper, MIT's Richard Stanley mentions something more or less the same as the open problem of counting the number linear extensions of a box (3 dimensions), but it is phrased in other language ("solid partitions"). http://www-math.mit.edut-rstan/pubs/pubfiles/12-2.pdf#page=18 This is a major open problem I intend to solve using results about free distributive lattices. I have corresponded with 2012 Nobel laureate in Economics Al Roth, w