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Aperiodical News Roundup – January 2024

By Katie Steckles and Peter Rowlett. Posted February 2, 2024

Here’s a round-up of some mathematical news stories not reported elsewhere on the site this month.

Maths News

Hiroki Takizawa claims Othello is solved: perfect play leads to a draw. (via Lance Fortnow)

Stephen Wolfram has announced version 14 of Mathematica, which will be available immediately both on the desktop and in the cloud. The latest version has 6602 built-in functions, and is accompanied by significant documentation and online tutorials to help people learn how to use it.



A new mathematical modelling competition, open from 1st Feb, invites predictions for when cherry trees will blossom in five cities in the USA and Japan, with cash and prizes awarded for a compelling narrative and reproducible analysis containing any data and code used. (via IMAmaths on X)

Science is reporting that a group of mathematicians are producing “low-quality papers” that repeatedly reference their work, distorting citation metrics apparently in an attempt to raise their institution’s rankings. As a result of this practice,

publishing analytics company Clarivate has excluded the entire field of math from the most recent edition of its influential list of authors of highly cited papers, released in November 2023.

(via Nalini Joshi on Mastodon)

Claire Voisin has been awarded the Crafoord Prize in Mathematics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences — the first woman to win this award in mathematics. (via European Mathematical Society on Mastodon)

Sad News

Several death announcements this month, including differential geometer Sigurður Helgason (via Nalini Joshi), Prof Nick Higham FRS, maths education giant Tony Gardiner (via Colin Wright) – and a lovely obituary of Tony from Sacha Borovik – Alan Schoen, physicist and discoverer of the gyroid (via Alison Martin), and Bernd Wegner, who was Editor-in-chief of zbMATH for 37 years (via European Mathematical Society).

Recent mathematical awards

By Peter Rowlett. Posted March 20, 2019

As well as the recent Abel Prize award to Karen Uhlenbeck, here are some other mathematical and related awards from this month.

Shaw Prize 2017 awarded to two algebraic geometers

By Katie Steckles. Posted June 12, 2017

The announcement of the Shaw Prize was posted on 23rd May, reading:

The Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences 2017 is awarded in equal shares to János Kollár and Claire Voisin for their remarkable results in many central areas of algebraic geometry, which have transformed the field and led to the solution of long-standing
problems that had appeared out of reach.

The prize is awarded annually to “individuals who are currently active in their respective fields and who have recently achieved distinguished and significant advances, who have made outstanding contributions in academic and scientific research or applications, or who in other domains have achieved excellence”.

The two joint winners this year, Kollár and Voisin, are both professors of algebraic geometry, at Princeton and Collège de France respectively, and have made major contributions to the effort to characterise rational varieties – solution sets of polynomials which differ from a projective space only by a low-dimensional subset.

Kollár’s work relates to the Minimal Model Program, which concerns moduli of higher-dimensional varieties – spaces whose points represent equivalence classes of varieties. These spaces, which Kollár has extensively worked on and developed the field dramatically, have applications in topology, combinatorics and physics. Voisin’s achievements have included solving the Kodaira problem (on complex projective manifolds), developing a technique for showing that a variety is not rational, and even finding a counterexample to an extension of the Hodge conjecture (one of the Clay prize problems), which rules out several approaches to the main conjecture.

More information

Shaw Prize announcement, laureate biographies and press release

János Kollár’s homepage

Claire Voisin’s homepage