Top news this month: Pure mathematicians at Leicester have opened a GoFundMe to pay for legal support in their fight to keep their jobs. The London Mathematical society has published a letter making the case for pure maths at Leicester, and there’s a petition you can sign.
Culture
Hannah Fry has a new TV show about maths and sport, on BT Sport and YouTube, called It’s A Numbers Game (or IT’S A NUMB3R5 GAME, if you believe the logo). She’s joined by Pippa Monique, Ugo Monye, Andrew Mensah and Dr Nick Owen. It’s on each Saturday on both BT Sport and YouTube. There are some resources for kids aged 5 to 14 on Twinkl, to go with the show.
Awards
Dr. Marie Davidian is the recipient of the 2021 Marvin Zelen Leadership Award in Statistical Science. (via Harvard Biostatistics)
UK mathematicians Yuhka Machino and Jenni Voon earned gold medals at the 2021 European Girls’ Mathematical Olympiad, and the UK team as a whole finished third. (via the UK Mathematics Trust)
Events
The Institute of Mathematics and its Applications is again running a series of online talks.
The first talk at the 6th May event will be from Nick Higham who has been awarded the Gold Medal award in recognition of outstanding contributions to mathematics and its applications. This will be followed by Jane Leeks and David Abrahams discussing future developments in mathematical sciences knowledge exchange.
There will be a couple more talks on the 25th of May to do with modelling and Covid-19.
More information: IMA Mathematics Online series
The London Mathematical Society is offering two summer placements – a Library and Special Collections Summer Placement (working with the LMS’s special collections) and an Equality and Diversity – Success Stories Placement (putting together profiles of successful mathematicians), both of which are paid hourly at three days a week for 8 weeks over the summer, and would suit prospective postgraduates with an undergraduate degree.
More information: Jobs at the LMS
The International Congress of Mathematicians is running a surprising maths videos contest. Prizes include a grant to attend ICM 2022 in St Petersburg, which won’t be much use to LGBT+ mathematicians, whose existence in Russia is illegal, or Azat Miftakhov, a student at Moscow State University who has been detained by Russian authorities for two years. If that doesn’t faze you, the ICM has produced an example of a surprising maths video:
Proof news
Kelsey Houston-Edwards writes in Quanta magazine about a proof of the Erdős-Faber-Lovász conjecture on colouring hypergraphs. The preprint by Dong Yeap Kang, Tom Kelly, Daniela Kühn, Abhishek Methuku and Deryk Osthus is available on the arXiv.
Also in Quanta magazine (if you can pay people to write maths news, they write maths news! Who knew?), Erica Klarreich writes about a counterexample to the unit conjecture on group algebras, presented at the end of a talk by Giles Gardam, and Steve Nadis writes about a recent proof of a special case of the Erdős-Hajnal conjecture in graph theory. That guy Erdős sure made a lot of conjectures.
Over on the mersenneforum.org, where seekers of new and exciting prime numbers hang out, it’s been reported that a new probable prime repunit has been found – it’s got a record 5794777 decimal digits, all of which are the digit 1. (via Ed Pegg)
Other news
Version 3.0 of SnapPy, program for studying the topology and geometry of 3-manifolds, has been released. (via Jordan Ellenberg)
Early Family Math is a new free maths resource website for children from 6 months to 6 years old. At the moment it has a lot of resources for activities, and some maths story books. They say that videos are forthcoming.
And finally, there’s a fundraiser for Mathematicians of the African Diaspora, which hosts the largest searchable database of mathematical scientists of the African Diaspora in the world, and is looking for funding to expand its database and reach a wider audience so it can continue to inspire the next generation of Black mathematicians. (via Edray Goins)