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Why polynomials with coefficients $0,1$ like to have only factors with $0,1$ coefficients?

Conjecture. Let $P(x),Q(x) \in \mathbb{R}[x]$ be two monic polynomials with non-negative coefficients. If $R(x)=P(x)Q(x)$ is $0,1$ polynomial (coefficients only from $\{0,1\}$), then $P(x)$ and $Q(x)$ ...
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Concerning the various proofs from the axiom of choice that R^3 admits of surprising geometrical decompositions into circles, skew lines and so on: can we prove in any instance that there are no Borel such decompositions? Or that AC is required?

This question follows up on a comment I made on Joseph O'Rourke's recent question, one of several questions here on mathoverflow concerning surprising geometric partitions of space using the axiom of ...
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What does the theta divisor of a number field know about its arithmetic?

This question is about a remark made by van der Geer and Schoof in their beautiful article "Effectivity of Arakelov divisors and the theta divisor of a number field" (from '98) (link). Let me first ...
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Can you solve the listed smallest open Diophantine equations?

In 2018, Zidane asked What is the smallest unsolved diophantine equation? The suggested way to measure size is substitute 2 instead of all variables, absolute values instead of all coefficients, and ...
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Thomason's "open letter" to the mathematical community

In the 1989, Bob Thomason left his CNRS position in Orsay and moved to Paris VII. It was during this period that he composed his "Open Letter" to the mathematical community. The letter ...
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Mikhalkin's tropical schemes versus Durov's tropical schemes

In Mikhalkin's unfinished draft book on tropical geometry, (available here) (page 26) he defines a notion of tropical schemes. It seems to me that this definition is not just a wholesale adaptation of ...
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Minimal volume of 4-manifolds

This question came up in a talk of Dieter Kotschick yesterday. The minimal volume of a manifold is the infimum of volumes of Riemannian metrics on the manifold with sectional curvatures bounded in ...
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Is there anything to the obvious analogy between Joyal's combinatorial species and Goodwillie calculus?

Combinatorial species and calculus of functors both take the viewpoint that many interesting functors can be expanded in a kind of Taylor series. Many operations familiar from actual calculus can be ...
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Computer calculations in A_infinity categories?

Is there a good computer program for doing calculations in A-infinity categories? Explicit calculations in A-infinity categories are an important, useful, yet very tedious task. One has to keep track ...
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Are there infinite versions of sporadic groups?

The classification of finite simple groups states roughly that every non-abelian finite simple group is either alternating, a group of Lie type, or a sporadic group. For each of the groups of Lie ...
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What is the three-dimensional hyperbolic volume of a four-manifold?

Every smooth closed orientable 4-manifold may be constructed via a handle decomposition. Before asking a couple of questions, I recall some well-known facts about handle-decompositions of 4-manifolds. ...
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Functor that maps to both $KO^n$ and $KO^{-n}$

(my question is also meaningful for complex K-theory, but since Kn(X) is always isomorphic to K-n(X), it's less interesting) I start by recalling the analytic definition of KO-theory: The following ...
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Why are there so few quaternionic representations of simple groups?

Having spent many hours looking through the Atlas of Finite Simple Groups while in Grad school, I recall being rather intrigued by the fact that among the sporadic groups, only one (McLaughlin as I ...
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Two-convexity ⇒ Lefschetz?

Assume that $\Omega$ is an open simply connected set in $\mathbb R^n$ (two-convexity) if 3 faces of a 3-simplex belong to $\Omega$ then whole simplex in $\Omega$. Is it true that any component of ...
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Grothendieck's "List of classes of structures"

In Lawvere's article Comments on the Development of Topos Theory, the author writes: Similarly, Grothendieck and others unerringly recognized which kinds of mathematical structures are 'preserved ...
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Correspondence between eigenvalue distributions of random unitary and random orthogonal matrices

In the course of a physics problem (arXiv:1206.6687), I stumbled on a curious correspondence between the eigenvalue distributions of the matrix product $U\bar{U}$, with $U$ a random unitary matrix and ...
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Metrics on the 3-sphere with knotted geodesics

According to answers to this question every metrics on $S^3$ admits a simple closed geodesic. Given a knot (or link) $K$, it's also quite simple to build a metric on $S^3$ such that $K$ is a geodesic (...

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