Building a national system of social governance (guojia zhili tixi), which is the long-running dream Xi Jinping, has triggered creation China’s ‘smart state’ using tools new information technologies to advance capacity (zhili nengli). These systems were already deployed nationally when COVID-19 pandemic hit China, but connected at lesser capacity, targeting specific domains security, industry o...

We study when the existence of an increasing selection can be derived from the monotonicity of a multifunction w.r.t. an extension of the basic order from points to subsets. The most interesting results emerge when the target is a lattice and monotonicity is interpreted in one of the ways suggested by A.F. Veinott, Jr. An increasing selection exists if (1) the multifunction is weakly ascending ...

For one-dimensional growth processes we consider the distribution of the height above a given point of the substrate and study its scale invariance in the limit of large times. We argue that for self-similar growth from a single seed the universal distribution is the Tracy-Widom distribution from the theory of random matrices and that for growth from a flat substrate it is some other, only nume...

We describe a simple one-person card game, patience sorting. Its analysis leads to a broad circle of ideas linking Young tableaux with the longest increasing subsequence of a random permutation via the Schensted correspondence. A recent highlight of this area is the work of Baik-Deift-Johansson which yields limiting probability laws via hard analysis of Toeplitz determinants.

The Hammersley process relates to the statistical properties of the maximum length of all up/right paths connecting random points of a given density in the unit square from (0,0) to (1,1). This process can also be interpreted in terms of the height of the polynuclear growth model, or the length of the longest increasing subsequence in a random permutation. The cumulative distribution of the lon...