In this series of posts, we’ll be featuring mathematical video and streaming channels from all over the internet, by speaking to the creators of the channel and asking them about what they do.
We spoke to Ellie Sleightholm about her YouTube channel, on which she posts roughly once a week to share the beauty in mathematics.
Here’s a short round-up of maths news from this month.
The 2026 Fields medals have been awarded to Yu Deng, John Pardon, Jacob Tsimerman and Hong Wang. The Fields Medal is awarded to recognize outstanding mathematical achievement for existing work and for the promise of future achievement, and this year’s winners work across PDEs, symplectic geometry, algebraic geometry, harmonic analysis and measure theory.
Hannah Fry has been awarded the IMU’s Leelavati prize for increasing public awareness of maths. “She has become a voice for mathematics that resonates far beyond the public audience normally interested in science communication. Through a wide range of media – including books, videos, and television programs – she has used outstanding creativity and originality to translate mathematics into a language of wonder and relevance for the public without diminishing its scope and importance.”
A result in braid theory has been proven by a team including Joan Birman, aged 99. The proof “reveals brand new insights into the geometry of braids” and closes the \(n=4\) case of the long-standing question of whether the Burau representation of the braid group is faithful. (via @gregegansf@mathstodon.xyz)
The theme selected for the 2027 International Day of Mathematics is ‘Mathematics, AI and Our Future’. “The theme explores the role of mathematics as the foundation of artificial intelligence and how mathematical ideas shape one of today’s most transformative technologies.”
In this series of posts, we’ll be featuring mathematical video and streaming channels from all over the internet, by speaking to the creators of the channel and asking them about what they do.
We spoke to Kala, who has an Instagram channel called MathsWithKala.
Here’s a round-up of some news from this month not otherwise covered on the site.
In this series of posts, we’ll be featuring mathematical video and streaming channels from all over the internet, by speaking to the creators of the channel and asking them about what they do.
We spoke to Stanley, who runs the StanDoesMath Instagram channel.
Here’s a short round-up of maths news stories from the last two months that we didn’t otherwise cover on the site.
Thomas Dieterrich, a representative of the arXiv, has clarified the site’s AI policy – in a Twitter thread (non-Twitter mirror link) he explains that their Code of Conduct states that the an author of a paper posted on the arXiv “takes full responsibility for all its contents, irrespective of how the contents were generated” – meaning that “if generative AI tools generate inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content, and that output is included in scientific works, it is the responsibility of the author(s)”.
The implications of this are serious – “If a submission contains incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation, this means we can’t trust anything in the paper.
The penalty is a 1-year ban from arXiv followed by the requirement that subsequent arXiv submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue”. The responses in the thread include some interesting discussion!
Relatedly, the Leiden Declaration on AI and Mathematics calls on researchers to implement AI use responsibly – including full disclosure when AI tools are used, taking responsibility for AI-generated content published in their name, and ensuring credit is given to sources (which is often difficult if AI surfaces something from its training data without credit). They also have some thoughts about the dangers of publishing results via informal channels like blog posts and social media, rather than through existing journals. You can add your name to the list of signatories if you agree! (via Dave Richeson on Bluesky)
Meanwhile, OpenAI says their model has disproved the planar unit distance conjecture, originally stated by Paul Erdős, which asks “If you place \(n\) points in the plane, how many pairs of points can be exactly distance \(1\) apart?”
Fields medallist Tim Gowers is impressed, saying “This will I think be looked back on as the first time that AI solved a major mathematics problem”. As always, Gil Kalai has blogged about it, including links to several other in-depth writeups – including this interesting take from Eric Hoel.
This year’s intake of new Royal Society Fellows contains a number of mathematicians and maths-adjacent researchers, including:
And finally, Michael Rabin, of the Miller-Rabin primality test (among many other achievements in cryptography and automata theory), has died at the age of 94.
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of March 2026, is now online at Tom Rocks Maths.
The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. See our Carnival of Mathematics page for more information.