Scott Duke Kominers, Columnist

Kominers’s Conundrums: A Virtual Lecture Hall With Hidden Ties

These 129 students aren’t total strangers. But can math reveal their connections?

September 12, 2020 at 12:00 PM UTC

Scott Duke Kominers is the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard University department of economics.

Pepper, left, and Doug, two faces in the crowd. — Pepper, left, and Doug, two faces in the crowd.
Photographer: FotografiaBasica/Getty Images

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This semester is only a week or two in, yet the anxieties of Zoom classes are well-known at this point: the awkwardness about knowing whose turn it is to talk; the risk of being Rickrolled by a llama.

But is there a better way to stay engaged, or even become engrossed? This week’s Conundrum is one way to do that. Where some see endless faces stacked atop one another, we see an opportunity: a puzzle that will teach us a bit about the math of online classes.