Here’s a round-up of some news from this month not otherwise covered on the site.
You're reading: News
- Sheila Bird becomes a Dame for services to statistics.
- I. David Abrahams, Professor University of Cambridge. Appointed CBE for services to mathematical sciences.
- Rachel Hilliam, Professor and Head of School of Mathematics and Statistics, Open University. Appointed OBE for services to data science.
- Rashmi Mantri, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, British Youth International College. Appointed OBE for services to mathematics education.
- Sanjiv Mahajan, Supporting Editor, 2025 United Nations System of National Accounts. Appointed MBE for services to Economic Statistics.
- Terence Tao, Professor of Mathematics, UCLA. Appointed Companion of the Order of Australia for eminent service to the mathematical sciences, to the global mathematics community, and to tertiary education and academia.
- Kaye Stacey, Emeritus Professor, University of Melbourne. Appointed Member of the Order of Australia for significant service to tertiary and secondary education, and to mathematics.
- Professor Dwight Barkley FRS (University of Warwick)
- Professor Francis Brown FRS (University of Oxford)
- Professor Frank Calegari FRS (University of Chicago, USA)
- Professor Mark Chaplain FRSE FRS (University of St Andrews and President, LMS)
- Professor Charlotte Deane MBE FRS (University of Oxford and Executive Chair, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council)
Particularly mathematical Birthday Honours 2026
The UK Government have announced the new set of King’s Birthday Honours. Here’s our selection of particularly mathematical entries for this year. If you spot any more, let us know in the comments and we’ll add to the list.
Get the full UK list from gov.uk and the Australian list from gov.au. Spot anyone we’ve missed? Let us know in the comments.
Updated 15/6/26 to add Tao and Stacey, thanks to Alex Corner.
Aperiodical News Roundup – April/May 2026
Here’s a short round-up of maths news stories from the last two months that we didn’t otherwise cover on the site.
Thomas Dieterrich, a representative of the arXiv, has clarified the site’s AI policy – in a Twitter thread (non-Twitter mirror link) he explains that their Code of Conduct states that the an author of a paper posted on the arXiv “takes full responsibility for all its contents, irrespective of how the contents were generated” – meaning that “if generative AI tools generate inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content, and that output is included in scientific works, it is the responsibility of the author(s)”.
The implications of this are serious – “If a submission contains incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation, this means we can’t trust anything in the paper.
The penalty is a 1-year ban from arXiv followed by the requirement that subsequent arXiv submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue”. The responses in the thread include some interesting discussion!
Relatedly, the Leiden Declaration on AI and Mathematics calls on researchers to implement AI use responsibly – including full disclosure when AI tools are used, taking responsibility for AI-generated content published in their name, and ensuring credit is given to sources (which is often difficult if AI surfaces something from its training data without credit). They also have some thoughts about the dangers of publishing results via informal channels like blog posts and social media, rather than through existing journals. You can add your name to the list of signatories if you agree! (via Dave Richeson on Bluesky)
Meanwhile, OpenAI says their model has disproved the planar unit distance conjecture, originally stated by Paul Erdős, which asks “If you place \(n\) points in the plane, how many pairs of points can be exactly distance \(1\) apart?”
Fields medallist Tim Gowers is impressed, saying “This will I think be looked back on as the first time that AI solved a major mathematics problem”. As always, Gil Kalai has blogged about it, including links to several other in-depth writeups – including this interesting take from Eric Hoel.
This year’s intake of new Royal Society Fellows contains a number of mathematicians and maths-adjacent researchers, including:
And finally, Michael Rabin, of the Miller-Rabin primality test (among many other achievements in cryptography and automata theory), has died at the age of 94.
Aperiodical News Roundup – March 2026
Here’s a quick round-up of maths internet news this month!
Progress has been made on the Lonely Runner problem, which concerns when runners of different speeds going round a track will meet up, and has connections to higher-dimensional geometry.
A workshop for queer and trans people in category theory, which has an excellent logo, will take place in Hamburg, 12-14 August 2026. (via tessa on mastodon)
The board of the journal Communications in Algebra have resigned in protest at policies imposed by the publisher, Taylor and Francis – including doubling the number of reviewers needed on each paper, which the board consider to be unsustainable. (via Michael Kinyon)
The arXiv is becoming independent from Cornell University, and is looking to hire a $300k/year CEO.
April sees the start of the Month of Math – 5 weeks of puzzles shared every two days, organised by the Joy of Thinking Foundation.
And finally: weird symbol news! The mystery of the Unicode symbol ⍼ has been solved: it represents azimuth. (via Oscar Cunningham)
Aperiodical News Roundup – February 2026
Here’s a short round-up of mathematical and maths-adjacent news from this month.
The LMS are seeking Outreach Lecturers, who must work in UK HE mathematics, and will receive a two-year post during which they’re expected to deliver talks to a minimum of 4 schools around the UK each year. The talks should be free to the schools, targeted at a minimum 75% schools with a high proportion of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. The post comes with a small honorarium to cover travel and ‘associated costs’, and the deadline for applications is 9th March.
The Royal Society has launched a Women in STEM History Map. They acknowledge there isn’t much on it yet, and have issued a call for help filling it in. (via Noel-Ann Bradshaw on LinkedIn)
Computer scientist Joe Halpern, known for his research on reasoning about knowledge and uncertainty, has died at 72. His book Reasoning about Knowledge is available as a PDF. (via Lance Fortnow on Mastodon)
In a recent issue of DMFT posted here, Colin investigated the connection between Jeffrey Epstein and the Gathering 4 Gardner recreational maths events. (It turns out, he was on their mailing list but never registered to attend).
Aperiodical News Roundup – January 2026
Here’s some mathematical news from last month that we didn’t otherwise report here.
Sad news
Dr Gladys West, one of the “Hidden Figures” behind developing the maths of GPS, has died. She was 95. (via A. Rivera). Metafilter has a comprehensive post about her work and influence here.
While it’s sad to lose nonagenarian heroes, it’s perhaps unavoidable. That seems less the case for another recent loss: the Mathematical Center of the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research was destroyed by the USA in its operation last week. (in Spanish; via matematiflo on mathstodon).
Accessibility news
Accessibility of mathematical materials is often an afterthought, if it’s a thought at all. I had to hurry back to put alt-text on the picture above. It’s good to see that several of maths’s learned societies (the AMS, EMS, LMS and SIAM) have published author guidelines for preparing accessible mathematics content.
AI happenings
There’s a fair amount of chat lately about whether the current set of AI tools can be useful to research mathematicians. In establishing whether AI tools can really help with new maths or whether they’re just regurgitating something they’ve seen elsewhere, it would be useful to have a set of problems whose answers are definitely known to humans, but haven’t appeared in any text corpus that the AI might have been trained on.
Eleven Serious Mathematicians have announced a project called “First proof” (1stproof.org), aiming to do just that. They’ve come up with ten mathematical questions and solved them, but rather than publishing the answers straight away, they’ve encrypted them for a week. So people have a week to try to get AI tools to come up with solutions, after which the human answers will be published and the AI solutions verified.
(via Terence Tao, who noticed the similarities with the old practice of publishing encrypted proofs to establish priority before properly writing them up)
Opportunity
Applications are open for PROMYS Europe 2026, a six-week residential summer programme at the University of Oxford, UK (July 12th to August 22nd). It’s open to pre-university students (age 16+) from across Europe (including “all countries adjacent to the Mediterranean”); the deadline is March 8th, but PROMYS recommend allowing plenty of time to tackle the problems that form part of the application.
Aperiodical News Roundup – December 2025
Here’s some mathematical news from last month we didn’t otherwise report on here.
Awards and Honours
The European Mathematical Society has awarded the 2025 Fermat prize to Vesselin Dimitrov and Vlad Vicol, “for breakthroughs in number theory, Diophantine geometry, and the analysis of fluid mechanics and turbulence.”
A portrait of mathematician Hannah Fry (below) has been commissioned by the Royal Society from Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year Chloe Barnes. The commission is part of a year-long celebration of the 80th anniversary of the first women elected to Royal Society Fellowship, Kathleen Lonsdale FRS and Marjory Stephenson FRS. Visitors can view the portrait at the Royal Society’s public events, including the Summer Science Exhibition during the first week of July, and Open House London in September (or by appointment on weekdays, or by looking at the image below).
Hannah Fry was awarded the Royal Society’s David Attenborough Award and Lecture 2024 in recognition of her significant work in public engagement with science and for her prolific role in popularising mathematics.
Mathematical Discoveries
New Game of Life discovery: a one-dimensional spaceship that’s 3,707,300,605 cells wide, that eventually recreates itself translated two cells to the right. (via Robin Houston on Mastodon).
There’s a new π calculation record – starting last July, computing industry reviewing publication StorageReview crunched a whopping 314 trillion digits, using a Dell PowerEdge R7725. The calculation took 110 days and finished in December. Still don’t know what the last digit is though, do they?
And in other slightly-larger number news, the number 751882!/751879# + 1 is the new largest known compositorial prime number, found by PrimeGrid. A compositorial number is one which is $n$ factorial (the product of all the numbers less than or equal to $n$, denoted $n!$) divided by $n$ primorial (the product of all the primes less than or equal to $n$, denoted $n\#$), so-called because it’s the product of all the composite numbers less than or equal to $n$. This number plus one, if prime, is then called a compositorial prime. At a truly whopping 3765621 decimal digits, this is now the largest known prime of this form. (via MOULE on mastodon)