My first math publication!

About two years ago I submitted a paper to the journal "Discrete Mathematics." I got the response "revise and resubmit" (translation: "make some changes, then we'll look at it again"). I revised and resubmitted and got the same response. I revised and resubmitted. Last week, I got a different response: my paper has been accepted for publication!

The name of the paper is "Improved Upper Bounds for the Information Rates of the Secret Sharing Schemes Induced by the Vamos Matroid." There are very few people in the world who know exactly what that means.

To summarize the punchline, there's a number x that mathematicians know is less than 10/11 (about .91) and a number y that mathematicians know is less than 9/10 (.9). I showed that x has to be less than 8/9 (about .89) and y has to be less than 17/19 (about .895). This probably doesn't sound like a big deal, but it was a big enough deal for the paper to get accepted! A surprisingly large amount of math consists of chipping away at numbers like this.

My favorite part is the way I showed that x and y had to be smaller than previously thought. Instead of using equations, I found a way to prove things using pretty pictures. :)