Here are some nice number facts and tricks you can try out on your friends. They will work without understanding how, but with a little investigation you should be able to figure out how each one works.
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Dynamo by Felice Varini
[youtube url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_P-8rArDnE]
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All odd integers greater than 7 are the sum of three odd primes!
It seems that big mathematical advances are like buses – you wait ages for one, and then two come along at once. Also revealed yesterday was a proof of the odd Goldbach conjecture: that all odd numbers greater than 7 can be written as the sum of exactly three odd primes. The proof is contained in Major arcs for Goldbach’s theorem, a paper submitted to the arXiv by Harald Helfgott, who’s a mathematician at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. This new paper completes the work started in Helfgott’s previous paper, Minor arcs for Golbach’s problem, published last year.
The strong Goldbach conjecture states that every even number can be written as the sum of two primes. This is still unproven, and remains one of the long-standing unproven results in number theory. Sadly, it’s the opinion of Terence Tao, among others, that the method used to prove the weak conjecture probably won’t work on the strong conjecture.
The paper: Major arcs for Goldbach’s theorem by Harald Helfgott
via Terry Tao on Google+
Integer sequence review: A051200
The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences contains over 200,000 sequences. It contains classics, curios, thousands of derivatives entered purely for completeness’s sake, short sequences whose completion would be a huge mathematical achievement, and some entries which are just downright silly.
For a lark, David and I have decided to review some of the Encyclopedia’s sequences. We’ll be rating sequences on four axes: Novelty, Aesthetics, Explicability and Completeness.
A051200
Except for initial term, primes of form “n 3’s followed by 1”.3, 31, 331, 3331, 33331, 333331, 3333331, 33333331, 333333333333333331, 3333333333333333333333333333333333333331, 33333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333331, ...
Primes gotta stick together
Update 14/05/2013: The seminar was successful: Zhang announced that his proof has already been refereed for the Annals, and everyone seems happy with it.
Hard Maths news now: there’s a rumour going round that Yitang (Tom) Zhang of the University of New Hampshire reckons he can prove that there are infinitely many different pairs of primes at most 70,000,000 apart.
OSCILLATE by Daniel Sierra
[vimeo url=https://vimeo.com/65475425]
Carnival of Mathematics 98
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of April, is now online at Andrew Taylor’s blog.
The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. For more information about the Carnival of Mathematics, click here.