Here’s a round-up of mathematical news stories that happened in the last couple of months, that we didn’t otherwise cover on the site.
Mathematical Discoveries
A newly discovered shape (ArXiV paper), described as a monostable tetrahedron, always lands the same way up – whatever orientation you place it in, gravity pulls it to the same place. There’s a write up in Quanta Magazine about it with some lovely videos. The write up mentions a lost physical model built in the 1980s, but it turns out Colin Wright has the model! Colin shares the story and some pictures in a blog post MonostableTetrahedron.
In other things-landing-on-particular-sides news, a new method for identifying stationary points of solids and the probabilities of resting at them has enabled the design of dice with target, non-uniform probabilities – and has been used to generate dice shaped like dragons, of course.
It’s now been confirmed that all the Mersenne numbers below M49 (three largest known Mersenne primes ago) have been checked and confirmed as being non-prime, so M49 is now definitely the 49th Mersenne prime.
The sixth Busy Beaver number, previously known to be greater than \(^{15}10\), has had its bounds improved – it’s really extremely big.
Up-and-coming mathematician Hanna Cairo has discovered a counterexample to Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a problem in harmonic analysis – here’s the ArXiV paper if you’d like to read it.
Quanta magazine also reports some new developments in sphere packing, on how to get increasingly dense packings in higher-dimensional space.
Other News
MathsWorldUK has announced in its latest newsletter (PDF) plans to launch a second maths discovery centre location, in London. Located in the heart of Southwark (not far from the Tate Modern), the new site MathsWorld promises to be “a vibrant playground for mathematical exploration”.
The five UK maths teaching associations are to merge – the The Association of Mathematics Education Teachers (AMET), the Association of Teachers of Mathematics (ATM), The Mathematical Association (MA), the National Association of Mathematics Advisers (NAMA) and the National Association for Numeracy and Mathematics in Colleges (NANAMIC) will henceforth be known as AMiE (the Association for Mathematics in Education).
Soccer team MK Dons are paying tribute to Bletchley Park Codebreakers with a new Enigma-themed away shirt, with a design of Enigma machine key caps (circles with letters in) in recognition of the work of codebreakers at the former stately home, close to their home ground.
Google’s Gemini Deep Think AI model has achieved gold-medal level performance at the International Mathematical Olympiad, having solved five out of the six IMO problems perfectly, and within the 4.5-hour time limit. Previous attempts have taken two to three days of computation, and this represents a significant improvement.
And finally, a piece of sad news: mathematician and musical satirist Tom Lehrer has died. We’d like to share our favourite Tom Lehrer quote: “Some of you may have had occasion to run into mathematicians and to wonder therefore how they got that way.”