Since it’s the time of year when you might be looking for mathematical gifts to buy for your friends, colleagues and loves ones, I thought I’d share some recommendations and suggestions for places to find gifts online.
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Aperiodical News Roundup – November 2023
Here’s a selection of mathematical news from the month of November that we didn’t otherwise mention on the site.
Proof News
The dream team of Tim Gowers, Ben Green, Freddie Manners and Terence Tao (pictured above) claim to have solved the polynomial Freiman-Ruzsa conjecture (originally conjectured by Hungarian mathematician Katalin Marton), which is described by Gil Kalai in this blog post as ‘the holy grail of additive combinatorics’. (via Terence Tao)
It’s claimed that the board game Othello has been solved: according to this arXiv paper, perfect play leads to a draw. (via Stephen Brooks)
Maths/politics
The UK Government has pledged “support to establish a National Academy focussed on mathematical sciences”. There has been a project to set up such an Academy as a recommendation from the Bond Review ‘The era of mathematics‘ in 2018, and it’s currently in a proto-setup phase.
Algorithmic trading firm XTX Markets has launched a $10m fund “designed to spur the creation of a publicly-shared AI model capable of winning a gold medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad”.
And finally
Ben Orlin has released a few interactive online versions of games from his book “Math Games With Bad Drawings”.
Carnival of Mathematics 222
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of November 2023, is now online at John D Cook’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.
\(-e^{i\pi}\) to Watch: Sum and Product
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 Bernhard Werner, who’s recently started a YouTube channel called Sum and Product to share mathematical visualisations and explanations.
Mathematical Drawing Hacks
At this year’s MathsJam UK Gathering, I had the pleasure of running one of the Saturday Night Tables – a chance to invite attendees at the Gathering to drop by and play with something. Together with fellow Manchester MathsJam regular Andrew Taylor, I ran a table of Mathematical Drawing Hacks – ways to make drawing complex mathematical objects and shapes easier.
21X competition – results
A while ago we announced a competition to win a copy of algebraic blackjack game 21X, which was recently successful on Kickstarter, smashing its funding target by an order of magnitude. If you’d like to pre-order a copy of the game, you can sign up to be notified when that’s possible.
We had over 30 entries in the competition, of which 20 achieved correct answers, and have picked a random set of winners to pass on to Naylor Games, who should be in touch with them by email in the next few days.
For anyone interested in seeing the answers, here’s what they were. As a reminder, the challenge here is to find a value for \(x\), given that \(n\) represents the number of cards, to get the total of all the card values closest to 21.
\(-e^{i\pi}\) to Watch: Keenan Crane
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 Keenan Crane, a professor in Computer Science & Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, who runs his own YouTube channel which has over 17,000 subscribers.