Happy 25/4! On this day in history:
So we’re a year old. Thanks for reading! Have a slice of cake:
To celebrate, CP has been hard at work redesigning the site. Hope you like it!
Today is Euler’s $-306 \times e^{i \pi}$th birthday, and Google have chosen to celebrate (despite ignoring several other prominent mathematical birthdays, including Erdős’s centenary – see the @MathsHistory twitter feed for a full list) by creating a Google doodle on their homepage.
For anyone who isn’t aware, this is when Google changes the image above the search box on the homepage at Google.com, so it still says ‘Google’ but using an appropriate image, which sometimes has built-in interactive elements. I thought it was worth pointing out some of the fantastic maths they’ve included in today’s doodle.
[Continue reading…]
Timothy Gowers’ mathematical writing experiment, which we reported on last month, has now concluded and the results are available. The experiment concerned a set of proofs of results on metric spaces; Gowers sought opinions on how well-written and understandable each one is.
It turns out that experiment was a ruse!: Gowers revealed on his blog that he has been working on a program which can produce human-readable proofs of propositions, and its proofs were smuggled in amongst two others written by humans. After revealing that, he asked for people to tell him which proofs were the computer’s. He’s just published the results of that second experiment on his blog, along with a description of the program.
Here’s a round up of some other recent (and now less so) news stories we didn’t cover in full.
Physicists from the University of Belgrade have discovered numerically 13 new solutions to the 3-body problem, in 2 dimensions. Described as “quite a feat in mathematical physics”, the discovery makes progress towards the long-standing problem of determining how three particles, when left to move under the action of their gravity on each other, will behave. The solutions they’ve found are all for particles moving in a 2-dimensional plane, and are represented using points on the surface of a sphere to describe the position of the three particles.
The Triangulation Conjecture, a result in topology, may turn out to be false as UCLA’s Ciprian Manolescu claims to have disproved it. The conjecture claims that every compact topological manifold can be triangulated by a locally finite simplicial complex, which means that, roughly, any surface (well, n-dimensional surface) can be divided into triangles in a specific way that topologists find exciting. The conjecture has already been disproved in dimension 4, although hope was held it might be true in higher dimensions. We’re still waiting for confirmation the disproof is correct, but if it is it wipes out many topologists’ hopes of being able to divide certain types of surfaces into triangles in a specific way.
Blog post on the topic, with an interesting comments discussion
(via Dave Richeson on Twitter)
A patent suit filed in the Eastern District of Texas has been dismissed on the grounds that mathematics cannot be patented. Uniloc, described in an article on news blog Rackspace as ‘a notorious patent troll’, alleged that a floating point numerical calculation by the Linux operating system violated U.S. Patent 5,892,697. You can’t patent maths!
Mathematics Cannot Be Patented – Case Dismissed at Rackspace
Fans of Open Access journals will be pleased to hear that the London Mathematical Society is launching one, titled Transactions of the London Mathematical Society. The LMS would like to emphasise that:
By launching this journal, the LMS is not promoting any particular cause and we do not advocate one publishing payment model over another.
Details can be found on pages 8-11 of their most recent newsletter.
The London Mathematical Society Popular Lectures for 2013 have been announced. Professor Ray Hill, University of Salford, will talk about ‘Mathematics in the Courtroom’, and Dr. Vicky Neale, University of Cambridge, will give a lecture on ‘Addictive Number Theory’.
We previously reported a Cambridge screening of the Travelling Salesman Movie, the “intellectual thriller about four of the world’s smartest mathematicians hired by the U.S. government to solve the most elusive problem in computer science history — P vs. NP”. Now the movie is being screened in London, by the City University London Student Union Computing Society (whose website charmingly has a command line interface). This will take place at City University London on the 18th of April 2013 at 6pm.
Here is the trailer:
Buy tickets (“Pay as you wish – £4 suggested Minimum”)
Travelling Salesman Movie official site
Interview with writer and director Timothy Lanzone on the Math/Maths Podcast.
The Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics, the Eötvös Loránd University and the János Bolyai Mathematical Society have announced a conference dedicated to the 100th anniversary of Paul Erdős from 1st-5th July 2013 in Budapest, Hungary.
Are redshirts really the most death-prone members of the Enterprise‘s crew? James Grime crunches the numbers.
29 April 2013
Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Paul Erdős, or as most people would call it, Erdős’ 100th birthday. So, Happy Birthday Paul.
26 March 2013
For International Women’s Day, we’ve written a short reminder of some the women who have contributed to the field of mathematics.
8 March 2013
A mix of interviews with interesting people and mathematical miscellanea, presented by Katie and Christian.
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Nice-looking maths & things using maths.
aka "You got your art in my maths!"
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