Here’s a round-up of the mathematical and maths-adjacent news stories we saw in the month of April.
Proof News
The Kahn-Kalai conjecture, a result from graph theory, has been proved in this ArXiV paper by Stanford mathematicians Jinyoung Park (a former postdoc of Abel prize winner Avi Widgerson) and Huy Tuan Pham. Here’s the writeup in Quanta magazine for those who want a good lay summary, a news piece about it on the Princeton IAS website, and a response from Gil Kalai about his conjecture being proved. (via Thomas Bloom)
Quanta have also covered the proof of the Van der Waerden conjecture, a result about polynomial roots, by Fields medalist Manjul Bhargava.
Big particle physics model news – a recent measurement of the mass of the W-boson doesn’t match the standard model, suggesting the theory may need some refinement.
Other maths news
The supreme court of Hungary has ruled that the Gömböc can’t be trademarked – despite its mathematical interestingness, it’s considered a decorative object apparently. (via David Eppstein on mathstodon)
I, Mathematicians is a new Twitter account which will be run by a different mathematician each week. There’s a signup form on that initial post, and this week it’s Dr Kimberley Ayers.
The most appropriate news we could possibly cover: there’s an Aperiodic Tiling conference and exhibition taking place at the Open University in June this year, in honour of the late Professor Uwe Grimm.
According to this tweet by Sidney Padua, her excellent book The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage will now be available in opera form. Following a preview show this month, the opera will premiere in Boston in 2023.
And finally
(photo: Wikipedia)
American mathematician Georgia Benkart has died (PDF), after a long career in research on representation theory and Lie algebras, publishing over 130 journal articles and making major contributions to the field.
British-Canadian mathematician and computer scientist John McKay, discoverer of monstrous moonshine and the McKay correspondence, also passed away this month.