Here’s some mathematical news from last month we didn’t otherwise report on here.
Awards and Honours
The European Mathematical Society has awarded the 2025 Fermat prize to Vesselin Dimitrov and Vlad Vicol, “for breakthroughs in number theory, Diophantine geometry, and the analysis of fluid mechanics and turbulence.”
A portrait of mathematician Hannah Fry (below) has been commissioned by the Royal Society from Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year Chloe Barnes. The commission is part of a year-long celebration of the 80th anniversary of the first women elected to Royal Society Fellowship, Kathleen Lonsdale FRS and Marjory Stephenson FRS. Visitors can view the portrait at the Royal Society’s public events, including the Summer Science Exhibition during the first week of July, and Open House London in September (or by appointment on weekdays, or by looking at the image below).
Hannah Fry was awarded the Royal Society’s David Attenborough Award and Lecture 2024 in recognition of her significant work in public engagement with science and for her prolific role in popularising mathematics.
Mathematical Discoveries
New Game of Life discovery: a one-dimensional spaceship that’s 3,707,300,605 cells wide, that eventually recreates itself translated two cells to the right. (via Robin Houston on Mastodon).
There’s a new π calculation record – starting last July, computing industry reviewing publication StorageReview crunched a whopping 314 trillion digits, using a Dell PowerEdge R7725. The calculation took 110 days and finished in December. Still don’t know what the last digit is though, do they?
And in other slightly-larger number news, the number 751882!/751879# + 1 is the new largest known compositorial prime number, found by PrimeGrid. A compositorial number is one which is $n$ factorial (the product of all the numbers less than or equal to $n$, denoted $n!$) divided by $n$ primorial (the product of all the primes less than or equal to $n$, denoted $n\#$), so-called because it’s the product of all the composite numbers less than or equal to $n$. This number plus one, if prime, is then called a compositorial prime. At a truly whopping 3765621 decimal digits, this is now the largest known prime of this form. (via MOULE on mastodon)