Here’s a round-up of some mathematical and maths-related news that happened in March 2025 that we didn’t otherwise cover on the site.
You're reading: Main
- Alison Etheridge, Professor of Probability, University of Oxford, and President, Academy for the Mathematical Sciences, becomes a Dame for services to the mathematical sciences.
- Francis Keenan, Professor (and former Head of School of Mathematics and Physics) at Queen’s University Belfast. Appointed MBE for services to higher education.
- John Westwell, Director, System Leadership, National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics. Appointed MBE for services to education.
- Adam McCamley, Senior Analyst, Liverpool City Council. Appointed MBE for services to social care data.
- Karen Pitt, Senior Telecoms Engineer, Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency. Awarded BEM for services to STEM skills (co-organising DVLA’s STEM programme especially via coding activities).
Aperiodical News Roundup – Jan & Feb 2025
Here’s a round-up of a few news items from the last couple of months not otherwise covered on the site.
Review: The Big Bang of Numbers by Manil Suri
This is a review of the book The Big Bang of Numbers by Manil Suri. We were kindly sent a copy of the book to look at, and Ashleigh Ratcliffe shares her thoughts.
In this book, Suri sets out to build the whole of modern mathematics from its foundations, and has chosen to do this by mirroring the Christian 7-day creation story – along with a persistent running joke about the author’s entirely fictional personal rivalry with the Pope, which at times is slightly distracting. Despite this, it’s a clever conceit and allows the story of creation of maths to unfold gradually.
The author takes a holistic approach to the field of mathematics – the book demonstrates the importance of mathematics in the universe, and how it would not be possible to exist without mathematics. Whilst the main story is about building the universe from mathematics, you also get an idea of the historical building and progress of mathematics as a field. I find it such a beautiful concept that in any universe, we would have maths.
On day 1 (my personal favourite) we have arithmetic. This chapter starts with thinking about what numbers are and why we need them. After constructing sets and numbers, we start playing games with numbers and then obtain the different operations. This is a fun way to approach arithmetic, especially as each number gets its own personality. By the end of day 1, we have the building blocks of the universe.
On day 2, we have geometry. Using our building blocks and some abstract ideas, we make space for the universe. We first get lines, then planes, and then space. The chapters in this section are littered with useful diagrams, images and ideas – such as getting points to act as lights to switch on and off, which in turn create shapes. This is a very imaginative and beautiful concept, and an approach to this topic I have never seen before. We also see appearances of geometry in nature, and some fabulous crochet creations.
On day 3 we have algebra, and we get further in touch with nature. We can view the things we already made, but now in terms of algebra – which surprisingly includes teaching mother nature how to draw!
On day 4 we have patterns, which introduces us the wonderful concept of symmetry. We also meet some more occurrences of maths in nature through the golden ratio, spirals and fractals. On day 5 we have physics, and the idea of spacetime from which we can build a simplistic gravitational model.
On day 6 we have infinity. The author builds an intuition for the concept of infinity through a sci-fi tale featuring Georg Cantor.
Finally, on day 7, we have emergence: the day of rest, where we sit back and admire what we have created. The ending is left open, which aligns with the exploratory and investigative nature of the book. However, as a reader, I felt slightly annoyed to have followed the path of building the universe for it to all then be questioned.
The first few days are very easy to follow and there are nice images and applications of mathematics throughout the book. The importance of mathematics is well portrayed throughout, especially through its occurrences in nature – for a large section of the book, the narrator is mother nature.
The further into the book we get, the more abstract the ideas become and in parts it is hard to follow. Some bits of the story are a little far-fetched, and there were some explanations that I struggled to get my head round – so I would expect it to be hard for a non-mathematician to completely understand, despite the book’s description on publisher Bloomsbury’s website: “an accessible introduction for enthusiastic novices”.
The endnotes have further content for more advanced readers to find/read more details on certain areas or ideas. In my opinion, some things in the text could have been put in the endnotes, and vice versa, allowing the main story to be easier to follow and understand.
Overall, this is a very unique and interesting book and one I very much enjoyed reading. A truly different maths book, which shows mathematics in a different light.
Aperiodical News Roundup – November & December 2024
Here’s a round-up of some news stories from the last two months of 2024, (mostly) not otherwise covered here on the Aperiodical.
Maths Research
At the start of December, John Carlos Baez shared on Mathstodon that the moving sofa problem may have been solved – the question of the largest possible shape you can fit around a 2D corner. For many years, a shape called Gerver’s sofa has been thought to be optimal, but an ArXiV paper from 29th November claims to have proved it is. More context in this blog post by Dan Romnik.
Depending on what you consider to be maths news, there were also reports that mathematicians have discovered a new type of cardinal numbers and a new kind of infinity.
And depending on what you consider to be good news, Terry Tao has also announced the creation of Renaissance Philanthropy and XTX Markets’ AI for Math fund, supporting projects that apply AI and machine learning to mathematics, with a focus on automated theorem proving. The deadline for initial expressions of interest is Jan 10, 2025.
Awards and Appointments
Computer algebra system PARI/GP has been awarded a CNRS prize “Prix science ouverte du logiciel libre de la recherche” (Open Science Awards for Free Software for Research). The awards highlight exceptional or very promising achievements, which can inspire the scientific community as well as society as a whole. An estimated user community of 25,000 people use PARI/GP regularly for research and hobbyist number theory. (via Rémi Eismann on SeqFan)
The other big news from last December was Hannah Fry’s appointment as Cambridge’s new Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics. She joined the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) on 1st January, and the role will involve communicating to diverse audiences, including with people not previously interested in maths. Fry follows in the footsteps of the late John Barrow, who informally took on the same role for much of his distinguished career.
“Communication is not an optional extra: if you are creating something that is used by, or interacts with members of the public or the world in general, then I think it’s genuinely your moral duty to engage the people affected by it. I’d love to build and grow a community around excellence in mathematical communication at Cambridge – so that we’re really researching the best possible methods to communicate with people.”
– Hannah Fry
Other news
From now until 11th February, Young Researcher applications for the Heidelberg Laureate Forum 2025 are open to any undergraduate/pre-master, PhD or PostDoc researchers who would like to join the highest level of mathematical laureates alongside hundreds of other researchers in maths and computer science for a week of talks, workshops and networking in the beautiful city of Heidelberg in September.
Particularly mathematical New Years Honours 2025
The UK Government have announced the latest list of honours, and we’ve taken a look for the particularly mathematical entries. Here is the selection for this year – if you spot any more, let us know in the comments and we’ll add to the list.
Mathematical Objects: Universe of cake
A conversation about mathematics inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Game of Logic. Presented by Katie Steckles and Peter Rowlett.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS | List of episodes
Exciting new maths of 2024
Over at the Finite Group, members (including me and Katie) have been discussing what in maths news has excited us this year. Here’s a summary.
Brayden Casella and fellow authors claimed that there exists a non-terminating game of Beggar-My-Neighbour, solving one of John H. Conway’s anti-Hilbert problems. Beggar-My-Neighbour is a card game similar to War in which two players deal cards onto a shared pile, aiming to win all the cards into their hand. Matthew Scroggs made a bot: Beggar-my-neighbour forever. In other game theory news, Othello is solved.
Jineon Baek claims a resolution to the moving sofa problem. This considers a 2D version of turning a sofa around an L-shaped corner, attempting to find a shape of largest area. (There are some nice animations at Wolfram MathWorld.) Baek offers a proof that the shape above, created by Joseph L. Gerver in 1992, is optimal.
The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) announced a new Mersenne prime:
One thing that’s new, apart from the prime itself, is that the work was done on a network of GPUs, ending “the 28-year reign of ordinary personal computers finding these huge prime numbers”. Also this was the first GIMPS prime discovered using a probable prime test, so the project chose to use the date the prime was verified by the Lucas-Lehmer primality test as the discovery date. In other computation news, the fifth Busy Beaver number has been found, as well as 202 trillion digits of pi.
A new elliptic curve was discovered, breaking a record set in 2006 and pushing at the limits of current methods for finding them. Here’s some background on the curves and some of the characters involved.
This year also saw a proof of the geometric Langlands conjecture, and this article explains why this is such a big deal.
We’re all still excited about the discovery of the aperiodic monotiles, and the result passed peer review and was published this year.
And finally, it may not be top research news, but 2024 was also the year that Colin Beveridge started his Double Maths First Thing newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter here, and check out the archive of past issues here at The Aperiodical.
Finite Group is a friendly online mathematical discussion group which is free to join, and members can also pay to access monthly livestreams (next one Friday 20th December 2024 at 8pm GMT and recorded for viewing later). The content isn’t at the level of the research mathematics in this post, but we try to have a fun time chatting about interesting maths. Join us!