Prasanna Ramakrishnan
pras17.bsky.social
Prasanna Ramakrishnan
@pras17.bsky.social
PhD Student in the Stanford CS Theory group, studying computational social choice.

https://web.stanford.edu/~pras1712/
More on the technical side, but I really like the lecture notes from a course Don Knuth taught in 1987 called “Mathematical Writing.”

If I’d read the first few pages in the first year of my PhD it probably would have saved my reviewers some time... There’s also some very fun anecdotes :).
jmlr.csail.mit.edu
July 7, 2025 at 12:35 AM
icymi they did indeed post the recording online! www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZII...
Terence Tao - Machine-Assisted Proofs (February 19, 2025)
YouTube video by Simons Foundation
www.youtube.com
February 25, 2025 at 7:07 AM
fwiw, he gave a talk with the same title at JMM last year, and that's on youtube! www.youtube.com/watch?v=AayZ...
Terence Tao, "Machine Assisted Proof"
YouTube video by Joint Mathematics Meetings
www.youtube.com
February 3, 2025 at 9:08 PM
There is a *distribution* over candidates that is preferred over any other by a majority of voters, in expectation. It's called a Maximal Lottery. This phenomenon is a special case of the fact that Nash equilibria always exist with mixed strategies, but not always with pure strategies.
December 8, 2024 at 6:35 AM
Before Arrow's Theorem there was Condorcet's Paradox, which says that there's not always a candidate that is preferred over any other by a majority of voters. (Even replacing "a majority" with 1% this is still true.)

But...
December 8, 2024 at 6:34 AM
Thanks for the great choice!! To continue the interesting discussion, I thought I'd mention my usual answer to "what's one result about voting you wish more people knew?"
December 8, 2024 at 6:34 AM
Tragically in voting theory, "optimality" is in the eye of the beholder.
December 8, 2024 at 6:27 AM
That's a wonderful way to make the case for Borda! (And I wasn't aware of it so thanks for sharing 😃.) It is worth pointing out that Borda still does not satisfy many desirable properties, e.g., Condorcet consistency, and strategyproofness (though nothing really does; see Gibbard–Satterthwaite).
December 8, 2024 at 6:27 AM