We spoke to friend of the site, award-winning maths communicator and past math-off competitor Kyle Evans about his Edinburgh Fringe show for 2023, which is about maths.
Interview: Kyle Evans on his 2023 Fringe show, Maths at the Museum
You're reading: Posts By Katie Steckles
Mathematical Objects: On-Sets
A conversation about mathematics inspired by a 1960s game designed to teach set theory. Presented by Katie Steckles and Peter Rowlett.
On-Sets: A Vintage Set Theory Game by Peter Rowlett is free to read in Math Horizons.
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Aperiodical News Roundup – May & June 2023
Maths news didn’t stop coming this month, and if you missed it, here was our coverage of the new Spectre aperiodic monotile, an improvement on the previous monotile discovery. Here’s some other news that happened in May and June which we didn’t otherwise cover here.
Vladimir Drinfeld and Shing-Tung Yau have been awarded the 2023 Shaw Prize for their contributions related to mathematical physics, to arithmetic geometry, differential geometry and Kähler geometry. (via the European Mathematical Society)
According to provisional 2023 entry data, mathematics remains the most popular choice at A level in England and Wales this year.
Ticket sales continue apace for this year’s TMiP maths communication conference, and in the meantime it’s inspired a nascent equivalent network for math communicators in the US – sign up if you’re an American math communicator who WLTM others.
There’s been a moderation strike at Stack Overflow, which includes Math Overflow, in response to AI-generated content policy changes. “Striking community members will refrain from moderating and curating content, including casting flags, and critical community-driven anti-spam and quality control infrastructure will be shut down.” (via theHigherGeometer)
There’s a free online IMA event, including a talk called ‘How Maths Helped Me to Annoy My Insurance Company’ by Victoria Sánchez Muñoz taking place at 5pm on Thursday 13 July.
Obviously the most important news this month is the new Rubik’s cube world record – it’s now possible for a human to solve the cube in as little as 3.13 seconds (furious they’ve skipped π seconds) and the GIF included in the article shows just how impressive the feat was.
And finally, this Nature article outlines how deep reinforcement learning has discovered faster sorting algorithms. Algorithms such as sorting or hashing are everywhere – used trillions of times a day, according to the article. This means even small efficiency improvements can be huge because of the scale, but these algorithms are so well-studied that further efficiency was difficult to imagine. DeepMind trained a deep reinforcement agent, AlphaDev, to work from scratch using assembly code to attempt to find a better sorting routine. The researchers reverse engineered the algorithms found by AlphaDev to C++ and found these led to performance improvements of “up to 70% for sequences of a length of five and roughly 1.7% for sequences exceeding 250,000 elements”. The Nature paper has details of the algorithmic improvements. The improved algorithms have already been implemented into the LLVM libc++ standard sorting library.
Mathematical Objects: A book with Sarah Hart
A conversation about mathematics and literature inspired by a book. Presented by Katie Steckles and Peter Rowlett with special guest Sarah Hart, author of Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature.
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Mathematical Objects: Battenberg cake
A conversation about mathematics inspired by a Battenberg cake. Presented by Katie Steckles and Peter Rowlett.
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Carnival of Mathematics 216
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of May 2023, is now online at Eddie’s Math and Calculator Blog.
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.
Mathematical Objects: Aperiodic monotile with Chaim Goodman-Strauss
A conversation about mathematics inspired by the new aperiodic monotile. Presented by Katie Steckles and Peter Rowlett, with special guest Chaim Goodman-Strauss.
The paper announcing the discovery is An aperiodic monotile by David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig S. Kaplan and Chaim Goodman-Strauss.
Chaim was recording from MoMath in New York, which will be running a creative artwork competition based on the monotile with UKMT. Chaim also mentioned a meeting in Oxford: Hatfest: celebrating the discovery of an Aperiodic Monotile.
Note: This podcast was recorded after the discovery of the ‘hat’ and ‘turtle’ monotiles but before the announcement of the ‘spectre’ monotile. Confused? Don’t worry, we explain in the episode!
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