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Zamore, Jacob's avatar

Hi I am curious as to your writing approach to these articles. Do you start with what you know and fill in the details later (ie citations, real world examples, etc), or are you investigating a completely foreign topic before each article?

Senia Sheydvasser's avatar

It varies. Most commonly, it is the former, but since many of them are at least partially inspired by questions I have been asked on Quora over the years, sometimes it dips into the latter.

For this particular article, I can actually trace the inspiration for it very directly: I originally read about the connection between tropical geometry and economics from a post on Quora (https://qr.ae/pGZjJw, if you are curious). I learned about its use in computer science later, when I was researching applications of abstract algebra. (See here: https://qr.ae/pGZDOL.)

Felipe Coelho Argolo's avatar

Nice! The diagrams remind me of combinatorial game theory thermographs.

https://argolostudio.substack.com/p/bits-6-lots-of-games-finding-comfort

Martin Murphy's avatar

This absolutely fascinating, I think this is the best maths Substack. Thank you.

Senia Sheydvasser's avatar

Thank you very much---that is very high praise!

Niclas's avatar

This is really cool! I would love to read another post where you describe in more detail how the auction works, and how it was influenced by tropical geometry.

Senia Sheydvasser's avatar

The trouble is, I am neither an economist nor a tropical geometer. Could I do it? Yes... but it would require some serious digging. I don't know that I have the time to do that right now. Perhaps in the future?

Soumen Sarkar's avatar

I am interyyp know if your company (PTC) applies this sophisticated concept in its software ...

Senia Sheydvasser's avatar

Not that I know of.