'Mathologer' is a YouTube channel that is easily up there with 3blue1brown in its ability to showcase how cool and beautiful math is. The latest video happens to be related to the work I did at Google. Here is the premise of the video:

A man owes $100, $200, and $300 to three different people, but the man only has $500 to repay the debts. How much of the $500 should each person get?

The video gives different solutions based on different definitions of "fairness", such as "proportional fairness" and "max-min fairness".

My work at Google was also about allocating a finite resource (network bandwidth) among users (Google products) with demands that often exceeded the available amount, as in the example above.

We used the same concepts from the video, including the water-fill visualizations. The added complexity is that we had projections of how resources and demands would change over time, so I had to figure out how to adapt these notions of fairness to time series data, with added rules such as "if you give a user X amount at some point in time, you can't take it away at a future point in time even if the fairness split has changed."

I don't want to break any confidentiality agreements, so I won't elaborate further to be safe 😛 . Highly recommend the video!

(Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNemXgZ-MWY)