Here’s a question that’s been in the back of my head for a while:
Starting from 1 and with just the arithmetic operations + – × ÷ available to you , how quickly can you build up to a given target number?
You can do this on pen and paper, or even just in your head, but I thought it’d make a good online game. That’s what this post is about.
Here’s some mathematical news from last month that we didn’t otherwise report here.
Dr Gladys West, one of the “Hidden Figures” behind developing the maths of GPS, has died. She was 95. (via A. Rivera). Metafilter has a comprehensive post about her work and influence here.
While it’s sad to lose nonagenarian heroes, it’s perhaps unavoidable. That seems less the case for another recent loss: the Mathematical Center of the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research was destroyed by the USA in its operation last week. (in Spanish; via matematiflo on mathstodon).
Accessibility of mathematical materials is often an afterthought, if it’s a thought at all. I had to hurry back to put alt-text on the picture above. It’s good to see that several of maths’s learned societies (the AMS, EMS, LMS and SIAM) have published author guidelines for preparing accessible mathematics content.
There’s a fair amount of chat lately about whether the current set of AI tools can be useful to research mathematicians. In establishing whether AI tools can really help with new maths or whether they’re just regurgitating something they’ve seen elsewhere, it would be useful to have a set of problems whose answers are definitely known to humans, but haven’t appeared in any text corpus that the AI might have been trained on.
Eleven Serious Mathematicians have announced a project called “First proof” (1stproof.org), aiming to do just that. They’ve come up with ten mathematical questions and solved them, but rather than publishing the answers straight away, they’ve encrypted them for a week. So people have a week to try to get AI tools to come up with solutions, after which the human answers will be published and the AI solutions verified.
(via Terence Tao, who noticed the similarities with the old practice of publishing encrypted proofs to establish priority before properly writing them up)
Applications are open for PROMYS Europe 2026, a six-week residential summer programme at the University of Oxford, UK (July 12th to August 22nd). It’s open to pre-university students (age 16+) from across Europe (including “all countries adjacent to the Mediterranean”); the deadline is March 8th, but PROMYS recommend allowing plenty of time to tackle the problems that form part of the application.
Maths Week England happened a couple of weeks ago. I had put my name on the speaker directory, and sure enough a maths lead from a primary school in County Durham emailed me to ask if I could go in and do something for them.
Here’s an update on my progress in the Beach Spectres project. I’ve put out two update videos since the last post but failed to write a post here. I promise I’m trying my best to be more organised than usual!
Somehow, I’ve been awarded the MEGA grant, from Matt Parker and Talking Maths in Public, for a ridiculous public maths project. I’d better get on that, then!
My plan is to go to the beach and use great big cookie cutters in the shape of the spectre aperiodic monotile to cover as much space as possible.
I’m trying something a bit different. Here’s a ten-minute video about a sequence I found on the OEIS.
A nice person called Payton Asch sent me an email with an observation about the Herschel enneahedron:
It looks like the underlying polytope for the enneahedron is a triangular bipyramid (two tetrahedra stacked on top of each other) or the dual polytope would be a triangular prism.
In the case of the triangular bipyramid you would truncate each of the vertices around the “equator” deep enough until the truncated areas meet at a vertex.