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Particularly mathematical New Years Honours 2025

By Peter Rowlett. Posted December 31, 2024

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.

• 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).

Get the full list from gov.uk.

Exciting new maths of 2024

By Peter Rowlett. Posted December 17, 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: \(2^{136,279,841}-1\). You can get maximum excitement about this news from Ayliean on TikTok, and join in the fun by signing up to record yourself saying a chunk of the prime for the Say The Prime project.

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!

Aperiodical News Roundup – October 2024

By Katie Steckles. Posted November 3, 2024

Here’s a roundup of some of the maths-related news from this month we didn’t otherwise cover here!

Aperiodical News Roundup – September 2024

By Katie Steckles. Posted October 7, 2024

Here’s a round-up of mathematical news stories from last month.

Aperiodical News Roundup – August 2024

By Katie Steckles. Posted August 31, 2024

Here’s a quick round-up of some news stories from this month.

Awards

The Royal Society has announced its award winners for 2024, which include mathematicians Ingrid Daubechies (Bakerian Medal/lecture for the physical sciences), Hannah Fry (David Attenborough Award/lecture for public engagement) and Philip Maini (Sylvester medal for mathematical research).







And the joint IMA/LMS Christopher Zeeman Medal for 2024 has been awarded to Brady Haran for his work in communicating mathematics via the Numberphile channel on YouTube.

Other news

The Protect Pure Maths campaign group has relaunched as the Campaign for Mathematical Sciences, encompassing a broader remit to promote and support mathematical activity in the UK.

In research news, an elliptic curve with rank at least 29 has been found by researchers Noam Elkies and Zev Klagsbrun. The previous record was rank ≥28, found by Elkies in 2006. (via Robin Houston)

\[y² + xy = x³ – 27006183241630922218434652145297453784768054621836357954737385x + 55258058551342376475736699591118191821521067032535079608372404779149413277716173425636721497\]

Pierre Cartier, mathematician and Bourbaki member, has died aged 92.

Aperiodical News Roundup – June/July 2024

By Katie Steckles. Posted August 5, 2024

Here’s a round-up of some news we didn’t cover on the Aperiodical in the last couple of months.

Aperiodical News Roundup – May 2024

By Katie Steckles. Posted June 18, 2024

Here’s a round-up of some of the mathematical news we saw last month.

Maths News

Thomas Hales and Koundinya Vajjha have claimed a proof of Mahler’s first conjecture, that the most unpackable centrally symmetric convex disk in the plane is a smoothed polygon. (via Greg Egan)

There’s also a been a proof of the geometric Langlands conjecture published, as outlined in this New Scientist article.

Zhouli Xu has claimed a proof of the Kervaire invariant one problem in dimension 126. (via Kyle Ormsby)

And finally, Hidetoshi Mino has counted all the magic squares of order 6. Up to rotations and reflections, there are 17,753,889,197,660,635,632. (via Walter Trump)



Awards and Appointments

The inaugural Jean-Pierre Demailly Prize for Open Science in Mathematics has been awarded to zbMath Open, “for its broad scope, recent policy changes, and commitment to accessibility and sustainability”. (via the European Mathematical Society)

It’s been announced that the first President of the newly-formed Academy for the Mathematical Sciences (AcadMathSci) will be Professor Alison Etheridge OBE FRS, a professor in Probability at the University of Oxford, and a world expert on stochastic processes and their applications. She will take up the role on 17 June 2024.

The Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences 2024 has been awarded to Peter Sarnak, “for his development of the arithmetic theory of thin groups and the affine sieve, by bringing together number theory, analysis, combinatorics, dynamics, geometry and spectral theory.” (via Paysages Mathématiques)



Other News

“Des chiffres et des lettres”, the French gameshow on which Countdown is based, has been cancelled after more than 50 years. (via Sarah Dal)

The UK Government has issued a call for £6m funding to set up a National Academy focused on Mathematical Sciences (NAM). Confusingly, this isn’t the same thing as the fledgling Academy for the Mathematical Sciences (AcadMathSci), though AcadMathSci may well bid to become the NAM. Clear?

And sadly, award-winning mathematician and co-founder of the Simons Foundation Jim Simons has died. (via Alberto Ramos)