Maths communicators: assemble! It’s that time again, when everyone’s favourite biannual maths communication conference happens (every two years, in case you weren’t sure). Talking Maths in Public is a conference for people who work in, or otherwise participate in, communicating mathematics to the public.
Actual aperiodicity news on The Aperiodical!
This is probably the biggest aperiodicity news we’ll ever cover here: David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig S. Kaplan, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss have produced a single shape which tiles the plane, and can’t be arranged to have translational symmetry.
And it’s so simple!
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of February 2023 is now online at SamHartburn.co.uk.
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.
Here’s a round-up of the news stories not covered on the site over the past month.
Baroness Ingrid Daubechies is the first woman to be awarded the Wolf Prize in Mathematics. Awarded annually to outstanding scientists and artists from around the world since 1978, the award consists of a certificate and a monetary award of $100,000. (via Nalini Joshi)
Maths communicator and TikToker Ayliean MacDonald has been appointed the first Community Mathematician at MathsCity Leeds. Ayliean will run a series of workshops and events at MathsCity, and wants to make maths a multi-sensory experience – sessions will include maths art activities, craft workshops, and maths-inspired food tasting!
The New Government chief scientific adviser Professor Dame Angela McLean is a mathematical biologist. Her PhD thesis was on ‘Mathematical models of the epidemiology of measles in developing countries’ and she has been active in creating models of COVID as a high-profile member of SAGE and SPI-M-O.
The OEIS foundation is looking to raise $3m to fund a full-time managing editor. Founded by Neil Sloane in 1964, the site has so far been run by volunteers, but now a committee of board members has been set up to help raise the necessary funds for an endowment. They have also released the entire source data of the encyclopedia on GitHub, under a Creative Commons Attribute Share-Alike licence. Previously, the data was available in a less-convenient form and only under a licence forbidding commercial use.
Humans can beat AI at Go again! As this article in the FT reports, Amateur Kellin Pelrine has found and exploited weakness in strategy systems that have otherwise dominated strategies used by the game’s grandmasters. (via @moreisdifferent)
The Office for Statistics Regulation has written to HM Treasury to tell it off for tweeting a graph with a non-zero vertical axis. The graph, which showed inflation statistics for January, started from 8% and “gives a misleading impression of the scale of the deceleration in inflation”.
And finally: well-loved mathematician and metagrobologist David Singmaster has died. He passed away earlier this month, and Lucas Garron has been collecting people’s memories of David Singmaster.
Here’s a round-up of news stories from January 2023.
The British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has announced that all students will study maths to age 18. The response has been varied, with commentators from both within mathematics and from non-mathematical backgrounds weighing in (with varying degrees of nuance).
However, this isn’t planned to happen soon – only to start the work to introduce this during this Parliament, with actual implementation to happen at an unspecified point in the future.
It’s worth noting that there is a shortage of maths teachers, with nearly half of schools currently using non-specialist maths teachers, according to the TES.
The fact this might make maths a political football is a bit of a problem – the opposition Labour party say “they’ve nothing to offer the country except double maths”. (As much as we love maths, we’ll agree there are more important things to worry about at the moment).
The Chrome browser, and eventually other browsers built on it such as Edge and Opera, can now render MathML without any additional libraries as of version 109. Chrome briefly had some support for MathML, which was removed in 2013 due to lack of interest from Google. The developers who were working on it have kept plugging away, funded by the open source software consultancy Igalia.
Until now, the only reliable way to display mathematical notation on the web has been to use a JavaScript library such as MathJax or KaTeX, which do all the work of laying out symbols using generic HTML elements.
Now, you can just put MathML code in a page and expect most browsers to display it, like this:
There’s still a need for MathJax and the like: writing MathML code is no fun, so they’re still useful for translating LaTeX code, and MathJax adds a range of annotations that help with accessibility. But this is a step towards mathematical notation being much easier to work with on the web!
The US National Academies have released a series of posters “Illustrating the impact of the mathematical sciences”.
CLP’s place of work still has some Millennium Maths Project posters clinging on to the walls, older than almost all of the students, so maybe it’s time for a refresh! (via Terence Tao)
Tim Austin is the new Regius professor mathematics at Warwick. (via Warwick Mathematics Institute)
A bit of bureaucracy news: the Council for the Mathematical Sciences, comprising the five learned societies for maths and stats in the UK, is creating a new Academy for the Mathematical Sciences. It looks like the societies for the different sub-disciplines have acknowledged they need to work together, though this gives off a “now you have n+1 standards” smell. They’ve got a nice logo, though.
The Financial Times style guide changed so that ‘data’ is always singular, pragmatically following common usage. FT writer Alan Beattie said it best: “For anyone opposed, I’d like to know what your agendum is.“
The London Mathematical Society will hold a ceremony in London on 22nd March to officially award the Christopher Zeeman medal to the 2020 and 2022 medallists, Matt Parker and Simon Singh.
The ICMS in Edinburhgh has launched a “Maths for Humanity” initiative, which will be “devoted to education, research, and scholarly exchange having direct relevance to the ways in which mathematics, broadly construed, can contribute to the betterment of humanity.” (via Terence Tao)
Yuri Marin has died. The Max Planck Institute has posted an obituary describing his life’s work. One of his PhD students, Arend Bayer, collected some memories in a Mastodon thread.
William ‘Bill’ Lawvere has died. There is a page on the nLab describing his life’s work.
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of January 2023 is now online at Ioanna Georgiou’s 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.
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the months of November and December 2022, is now online at Ganit Charcha.
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.