Recently we reported that Eva Gallarda and Carl Cowen had announced they had a proof of the invariant subspace conjecture for Hilbert spaces.
Well, yesterday they announced at the blog Café Matemático that there was a problem with their proof:
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- interesting careers in statistics (tell the world why your job in statistics is a great job, or why it is interesting and fun to be a statistician)
International Year of Statistics Video Contest
In case you’d already forgotten, 2013 is the International Year of Statistics (I had; turns out Katie told us about it just after the New Year). One of the many activities going on is a video contest sponsored by the publishers Wiley.
Take it away, Wiley!
We invite videos of four minutes in length or less that illustrate
Prizes of $250 to $1000 will be awarded for the best videos, with special prizes for “the best videos by a person or persons 18 years of age or less and the best non-English language videos”.
Submissions must be received by February the 28th, so get rolling.
More information
Éditions Hermann donates its Bourbaki archives to the Bibliothèque nationale de France
A collection of material pertaining to Nicolas Bourbaki, author of the famous Elements of Mathematics, has been donated to the French national library by his publisher, éditions Hermann. Bourbaki set out to reframe modern maths in terms of set theory, to give the subject a coherence that would lead to more rigour and cross-application of results.
The donated material consists of “original texts, corrected proofs of the Elements of Mathematics, as well as various items related to the publication of the books including catalogues, press releases, contemporary journal articles on Bourbaki, and letters.”
More information (all in French)
Les éditions Hermann font don d’archives Nicolas Bourbaki à la Bibliothèque nationale de France – (PDF) press release from the BNF and Hermann.
Les Archives Bourbaki à la BNF – potted history of Bourbaki in Libération.
Nicolas Bourbaki fait son entrée à la BNF! – hour-long radio programme on France Culture, including contributions from Pierre Cartier, former avatar of Bourbaki, and Guillaume Fau, curator of manuscripts at the BNF.
Nicolas Bourbaki entry on MacTutor (in English)
Join the Aperiodical News Team
There’s too much maths news for us to cover, so we’re looking for a few volunteers to help out in our new News Team.
A fairly big part of what this site is for is to cover mathematical news. We like to write short, to-the-point posts pointing to the relevant information about current events. These don’t have to be as in-depth as a feature or column blog post, but are a great way to keep everyone aware of what is going on in the mathematical world.
Most weeks we find more stories than we find time to write up, and the three of us (Katie, CP and Peter) have ever-growing work commitments, so we’re seeing if anyone wants to help out. Read on to find out what’s involved, or if you’re feeling nosy about how we write up news.
Geometric animated GIFs by Paolo Čerić
Paolo Čerić is an information processing student from Croatia. He’s developed a cool style of animated geometrical GIFs created using processing, which he posts on his Tumblr blog.
via Colossal
Log-log! Who’s there? Not a power law!
This is a story about a particularly awful bit of science reporting. It’s taken me a while to sort out what’s going on. First I thought it was bad maths, then I thought it was bad science, and now I think it might be bad journalism. But it might be none, all, some, or a superset of those. I didn’t really want to write this post because crowing about other people’s apparent failures isn’t great, but we took a team decision to cover it because of entertainment reasons. ((Unlike the BBC, we are not funded in a unique way, so we have no public service remit. I think that’s right.)) I’m going to make an attempt to tell you what I’ve found, a little bit of what I think, and then we can rejoin Team Positive Mental Attitude when it’s all over.
The invariant subspace problem is solved for Hilbert spaces?
Update 05/02/2013: Cowen and Gallardo say that a problem has been found in their proof and they no longer claim an answer to the invariant subspace problem.
At the congress of la Real Sociedad Matemática Española yesterday, Eva Gallarda and Carl Cowen presented an affirmative answer to the invariant subspace problem on separable Hilbert spaces. While it isn’t a Millennium Prize problem, it’s one of the big open problems in maths. As far as I can tell, it hasn’t been through any formal peer review yet, but they’re serious people and you’ve got to be quite sure about this kind of thing before announcing it at such a high-profile event.