With nonmonotonic irregularity, it’s time for another Follow Friday – a round up of the maths people on Twitter you should be following, or at least some fun links you can look at.
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Carnival of Mathematics 91
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of September, is now online at Matheminutes.
The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. For more information about the Carnival of Mathematics, click here.
PRIMES-USA
PRIMES, it turns out, isn’t just a word for numbers without any proper factors – it’s also a mentoring programme for high school students in the USA, based at MIT. The students visit there once a week from February to May, and work with academics on real research. They also run similar programmes for computer science and computational biology.
The scheme has recently been extended to allow students not local to MIT (or in possession of a private jet or teleporter ((Although if they’ve invented a teleporter, this scheme probably can’t help them much)) ) to attend. PRIMES-USA is a national scheme for students across the country, which requires them to visit MIT for a conference in May, but the rest of the meetings take place via Skype.
Henry Segerman’s 30-cell puzzle
Henry Segerman is a mathematician at the University of Melbourne with a keen interest in 3d-printing mathematical shapes. He’s just uploaded a video showing off his latest creation, a 30-cell burr puzzle created in collaboration with Saul Schleimer:
[youtube url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJwqT_sbB_A]
Pretty cool, eh?
As well as providing a PDF describing the puzzle, Henry’s uploaded the design to Shapeways so you can have your very own copy to play with.
Earlier this year, Henry and Saul’s half 120- and 600-cells won the “Best Use of Mathematics” award at the 2012 Bridges Conference.
Probabilitelly
On the 18th of October BBC Four is going to broadcast a programme called Tails You Win: The Science of Chance, presented by Prof David Spiegelhalter, as part of its Big Science series.
Here’s the BBC’s description:
Smart and witty, jam-packed with augmented-reality graphics and fascinating history, this film, presented by Professor David Spiegelhalter, tries to pin down what chance is and how it works in the real world. For once this really is ‘risky’ television ((I’m going to guess this sentence is what clinched the commission – CP)).
The film follows in the footsteps of The Joy of Stats, which won the prestigious Grierson Award for Best Science/Natural History programme of 2011. Now the same blend of wit and wisdom, animation, graphics and gleeful nerdery is applied to the joys of chance and the mysteries of probability, the vital branch of mathematics that gives us a handle on what might happen in the future. Professor Spiegelhalter is ideally suited to that task, being Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge University, as well as being a recent Winter Wipeout contestant on BBC TV.
Proof News
Here’s a little catch-up with the status of the claimed proofs of some big statements that were announced recently.
At the end of August, Shin Mochizuki released what he claims is a proof of the abc conjecture (link goes to a PDF). Barring someone spotting a huge error, it’s going to take a long time to verify. It’s mainly quiet at the moment, apart from a claimed set of counterexamples to one of Mochizuki’s intermediate theorems posted by Vesselin Dimitrov on MathOverflow, which was quickly shut down because the community there didn’t approve of MO being used to debate the validity of the proof. No doubt there are other niggles being worked out in private as well.
At the start of September, Justin Moore uploaded to the arXiv what he claimed was a proof that Thompson’s group F is amenable. Like Mochizuki’s abc proof, experts thought Moore’s proof was highly credible. We were waiting for my chum Nathan to write about it, since his PhD was all about Thompson’s groups F and V, but it turns out we don’t need to: at the start of this week, Justin retracted his paper because of an error which “appears to be both serious and irreparable”. The amenability of Thompson’s group F has been proven and disproven many times, so I still want Nathan to tell me (and you) all about it.
In lighter news, via Richard Green on Google+, recent uploads to the arXiv show that Goldbach’s conjecture and the Riemann hypothesis are true. I’d love to know how it feels to upload a six-page paper which you know proves something like the Riemann hypothesis. It must be a lovely state of mind. Certainly much better than what people like Moore and Mochizuki must go through, waiting for the first email to arrive telling them they’ve made a terrible mistake and their work is not yet complete.
If I’ve inspired you to have a go yourself, look at Wikipedia’s list of unsolved problems in mathematics and take a crack at one this weekend. Can’t hurt ((Disclaimer: depending on levels of ability, perseverance and agreement with consensus reality, attempts to solve these problems may well ruin your life)) to try!
Math/Maths 115: Isaac Newton’s Death (mask)
A new episode of the Math/Maths Podcast has been released.
A conversation about mathematics between the UK and USA from Pulse-Project.org. Peter battles freshers’ flu and Samuel tries to resist boasting about Relatively Prime long enough to talk about: Proofs for the Goldbach conjecture and the Riemann hypothesis?: Possible Problem with ABC proof; What happened when MPs took a maths exam; Isaac Newton’s Death mask; Graduate jobs: Top 10 degree subjects by lifetime salary: Operational research; MSU Math Professor Breaks Down, Removes His Clothes In Front of Class; Return to Antikythera: Divers revisit wreck where ancient computer found; MacArthur Fellows; The Mathematics Behind xkcd: A Conversation with Randall Munroe; 2012 David Crighton Award; MathOverflow turns 3; MathJax v2.1-beta now available; Ada Lovelace Day is coming; and more.
Get this episode: Math/Maths 115: Isaac Newton’s Death (mask)