Here’s a round-up of mathematical news from this month we didn’t otherwise cover on the site.
Owing to a spam email we got which included the sentence “Given your recent roundup on AI and mathematical proof, I thought this might be of interest”, followed by some AI generated maths we don’t care about, we probably won’t post about AI in the news as much; rest assured though, it’s probably still going on.
The IMA Gold Medal 2026 has been awarded to Celia Hoyles and Chris Budd – or, more accurately, to Professor Dame Celia Hoyles DBE CMath Hon FIMA and Professor Christopher Budd OBE CMath FIMA. The award recognises “outstanding contributions to mathematics and its applications over a period of years”.
Dame Celia is being acknowledged for her “exceptional and internationally influential contribution to mathematics education over more than five decades”; meanwhile, Professor Budd is “a world-leading industrial mathematician who has a distinguished track record as a pioneer in the application of mathematical techniques to bring new insights into a wide range of real-world problems, notably weather forecasting and climate change. [… and ] also an enthusiastic communicator of mathematics”. The pair will be presented with the medals at a ceremony in 2027.
In more traditional maths news, there’s a new Rubik’s world record – impressively tiny child Xuanyi Geng has solved a 3×3×3 cube in 2.51 seconds, beating the previous record of 2.76 seconds by Teodor Zajder.
In sad news, pioneering computer scientist Margaret Hamilton has died at the age of 90. If the name sounds familiar, you might have seen the famous photo of Hamilton (right) standing next to a giant pile of printed code, which was what she and her team wrote to help send Apollo 11 to the moon. Hamilton was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 by President Barack Obama, who said she “symbolises that generation of unsung women who helped send humankind into space”.
And finally, for Ada Lovelace Day 2026 (which took place on 13th October), a publisher’s in Boston have released newly typeset and bound book of Ada Lovelace’s Notes on the Analytical Engine – pricey, but it does look pretty.