Heidelberg Castle selfie

Paul and I have spent this week blogging from the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, an international event for PhD/postdoc students and top-level maths and computer science researchers.

It was a long week of extravagant dinners, incredible talks and press conferences, (maths) celeb spotting, branded conference freebies, hilarious quotes and exceptional hospitality. Oh, and blogging. Here’s a round-up of what we wrote, in case you’ve missed it this week, as well as some of the other posts the rest of the HLF blog team wrote.

Blog posts by Katie

• • Math ⇔ Art: what is a rotogon?, inspired by one of the works in the conference’s accompanying art exhibit
  • Approximate Gaussian Elimination, on approximation algorithms and laureate Daniel Spielman’s talk
  • A Mathematical Easter Egg, on a disappointing hidden feature of the conference app
  • Michael Atiyah’s Favourite Manifold , on the Fields medalist and Abel Prize winner’s most beloved locally Euclidean space
  • Fractals for dinner, which is what happens when you serve a certain kind of broccoli to a mathematician
  • Mathematical Theories of Communication, on Nevanlinna Prize winner Madhu Sudan’s talk

Blog posts by Paul

• • The numbers behind the young researchers, written after hassling the 200-strong contingent of young researchers present to tell us what kinds of numbers they use in their work (by Paul and Katie)
  • Math ⇔ Art: the Gosper curve, on a fractal curve found in two of the artworks in the conference’s accompanying art exhibit
  • Vint Cerf’s press conference: in quotes , written following an entertaining press conference with Google’s chief evangelist and ACM Turing award winner
  • Leslie Lamport thinks your proofs are bad, on one of the conference’s more controversial talks, demonstrating a method for more structured proofs

A few more posts may appear on the blog over the coming week or so, and we’ll post them across here as well.

L-R: Coni, Nana, Alaina, Katie, Ben, Paul; photo taken in Heidelberg Castle

Katie and Paul were only part of the blog team at the HLF – they were joined by Math With Bad Drawings’ Ben Orlin, a maths teacher, prolific blogger and author; Constanza (Coni) Rojas-Molina, who draws amazing sketch summaries of talks, blogs at The RAGE of the Blackboard and researches mathematical physics at the University of Bonn; Nana Liu, a quantum computing researcher there to cover the event’s ‘hot topic’ session on Quantum Computing; and Alaina Levine, a freelance writer, speaker and consultant based in Arizona. They were joined by (not pictured) Tobias Maier (biologist) and Markus Possel (physicist), who both blog in English and German.

Here are some of our favourite posts from the rest of the blog team:

• Coni’s sketch summary of the conference’s opening ceremony
• No, there’s no Nobel in Math by Ben, on the range of alternative awards available to mathematicians and computer scientists
• An interview with Vint Cerf in two parts (Part 1 and Part 2) on success in STEM and how to plan your career, by Alaina
• Ben also spent some time hassling the young researchers, to produce two posts – one detailing their current research and one on their predictions for developments in their fields in the next 5 years
• Markus‘ writeup of the women’s session at the conference and on the experience of women in maths and computer science, with a comment on some of the disappointingly #allmalepanels that took place during the week
• Coni’s graphic summaries of some of the talks at the conference, in two parts (Part 1 and Part 2)
• The 25 Who Are Here, and 1 Who Is Not by Ben, on the tragic loss of Maryam Mirzakhani earlier this year
• A series of snapshot interviews with six of the 200 young researchers, by Tobias
• The deep learning revolution with John Hopcroft, by Nana
• The Professor vs. the NSA by Ben, on the fascinating story of how Diffie and Hellman’s early work on public-key cryptography was technically illegal and their run-ins with the US government
• A lovely post demonstrating the Deep Learning algorithms for live translation, written by Markus and live-translated resulting in a slightly odd surface reading…

You can see the rest of the HLF blog where it’s hosted at Spektrum SciLogs.