Here’s a round-up of maths news stories from this month we haven’t otherwise covered on the Aperiodical (not including, of course, the important enneahedron news Christian just posted about).
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#mathober 2025
We’ve gone crashing into October and that means it’s also #Mathober, an annual maths/art celebration taking place on the internet. If you’re into maths or art, or both, and would like to try producing something creative this month, on an informal schedule, #mathober provides a structure for you to do that.
Carnival of Maths 242
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of August 2025, is now online at Flying Colours 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.
Carnival of Maths #241
Welcome to the 241st Carnival of Mathematics, hosted here at the home of the Carnival, The Aperiodical. The Aperiodical is a shared blog written and curated by Katie Steckles (me), Christian Lawson-Perfect and Peter Rowlett, where we share interesting maths news and content, aimed at people who already know they like maths and would like to know more. The Carnival of Maths is administered by the Aperiodical, and if you’d like to host one on your own blog or see previous editions, you can visit the Carnival of Maths page.
Aperiodical News Roundup – June & July 2025
Here’s a round-up of mathematical news stories that happened in the last couple of months, that we didn’t otherwise cover on the site.
Mathematical Discoveries
A newly discovered shape (ArXiV paper), described as a monostable tetrahedron, always lands the same way up – whatever orientation you place it in, gravity pulls it to the same place. There’s a write up in Quanta Magazine about it with some lovely videos. The write up mentions a lost physical model built in the 1980s, but it turns out Colin Wright has the model! Colin shares the story and some pictures in a blog post MonostableTetrahedron.
In other things-landing-on-particular-sides news, a new method for identifying stationary points of solids and the probabilities of resting at them has enabled the design of dice with target, non-uniform probabilities – and has been used to generate dice shaped like dragons, of course.
It’s now been confirmed that all the Mersenne numbers below M49 (three largest known Mersenne primes ago) have been checked and confirmed as being non-prime, so M49 is now definitely the 49th Mersenne prime.
The sixth Busy Beaver number, previously known to be greater than \(^{15}10\), has had its bounds improved – it’s really extremely big.
Up-and-coming mathematician Hanna Cairo has discovered a counterexample to Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a problem in harmonic analysis – here’s the ArXiV paper if you’d like to read it.
Quanta magazine also reports some new developments in sphere packing, on how to get increasingly dense packings in higher-dimensional space.
Other News
MathsWorldUK has announced in its latest newsletter (PDF) plans to launch a second maths discovery centre location, in London. Located in the heart of Southwark (not far from the Tate Modern), the new site MathsWorld promises to be “a vibrant playground for mathematical exploration”.
The five UK maths teaching associations are to merge – the The Association of Mathematics Education Teachers (AMET), the Association of Teachers of Mathematics (ATM), The Mathematical Association (MA), the National Association of Mathematics Advisers (NAMA) and the National Association for Numeracy and Mathematics in Colleges (NANAMIC) will henceforth be known as AMiE (the Association for Mathematics in Education).
Soccer team MK Dons are paying tribute to Bletchley Park Codebreakers with a new Enigma-themed away shirt, with a design of Enigma machine key caps (circles with letters in) in recognition of the work of codebreakers at the former stately home, close to their home ground.
Google’s Gemini Deep Think AI model has achieved gold-medal level performance at the International Mathematical Olympiad, having solved five out of the six IMO problems perfectly, and within the 4.5-hour time limit. Previous attempts have taken two to three days of computation, and this represents a significant improvement.
And finally, a piece of sad news: mathematician and musical satirist Tom Lehrer has died. We’d like to share our favourite Tom Lehrer quote: “Some of you may have had occasion to run into mathematicians and to wonder therefore how they got that way.”
Maths at the Edinburgh Fringe, 2025
Tomorrow is the start of August, and if you’re anywhere near Edinburgh you’ll be aware that the city is already overrun with musicians, comedians and street performers plying their trade as part of the month-long Fringe festival. If you were wondering whether any of the shows were maths-related, the answer is yes! And we’ve saved you the hassle of searching the Fringe programme website for the word ‘maths’ and related terms – below is an outline of some maths-related shows you might enjoy.
\(-e^{i\pi}\) to Watch: Another Roof
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 Alex, whose channel Another Roof covers higher-level maths topics he can’t necessarily cover with the school students he teaches.