The Aperiodical 

You're reading: News Roundup

Aperiodical News Roundup – October & November 2025

By Katie Steckles. Posted December 1, 2025

Here’s a round-up of maths news from October and November 2025 which we didn’t otherwise cover on the site.

Awards and Grants

Applications for participation in the 13th Heidelberg Laureate Forum for Outstanding Young Researchers in Mathematics and Computer Science is now open . If you’re selected, you can join the conference in September in Heidelberg, Germany, and meet laureates of the most prestigious prizes in the fields of mathematics and computer science – including the Abel Prize, the ACM A.M. Turing Award, the ACM Prize in Computing, the Fields Medal, the IMU Abacus Medal and the Nevanlinna Prize – and engage in cross-generational scientific dialogue, including with other young researchers. The 13th HLF will take place from September 13 to 18, 2026.

The application period runs until February 11, 2026, and young researchers at all phases of their careers (undergrad, PhD or postdoc) can apply at application.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org. There are 100 spaces available for researchers from both mathematics and computer science, respectively, and all applicants will be notified by the end of April 2026 about whether or not they have been selected. For questions regarding the requirements and the application process, please see the HLF FAQs or visit heidelberg-laureate-forum.org.



Mathematician Nalini Joshi has been awarded New South Wales Scientist of the Year 2025, for her pioneering work which “has transformed the field of integrable systems. She is internationally recognised for introducing geometric and asymptotic methods to study discrete and continuous nonlinear mathematical models, [and] her results have led to crucial information about singularity structure and to improved tests for the identification of critical models called integrable systems.”

Algorithmic trading firm XTX markets has announced £26m funding for PhD students and postdoctoral researchers in pure maths. According to the press release, “XTX Markets is launching the Early-Career Research Funding programme, designed to increase the number and quality of PhDs and postdocs entering the talent pipeline at top UK universities. The programme aims to create more than 100 new early career research positions, across seven universities, with entry in 2026, 2027 and 2028. The funding will support PhD students and postdoctoral research associates in pure maths.” (via Daniel Colquitt)

Other News

A Paris court has blocked Pascal’s La Pascaline calculator being exported from France – described as “one of the world’s first calculating machines”, the calculator is provisionally blocked from export due to heritage protection arguments. The auction, at which valuations suggested the machine could fetch €2m to 3m (£1.7m to £2.6m), has been postponed.

And finally, as of 1st December, five UK maths teaching associations merge to form the Association for Mathematics in Education (AMiE). Following overwhelming votes by members of AMET, ATM, MA, NAMA and NANAMIC in support of a merger, the new organisation will serve all teachers of maths in the UK and “foster lifelong skills, promote collaboration and make mathematics accessible, relevant, and engaging for all”.

Aperiodical News Roundup – August/September 2025

By Katie Steckles. Posted October 3, 2025

Here’s a round-up of maths news stories from this month we haven’t otherwise covered on the Aperiodical (not including, of course, the important enneahedron news Christian just posted about).

Aperiodical News Roundup – June & July 2025

By Katie Steckles. Posted August 1, 2025

Here’s a round-up of mathematical news stories that happened in the last couple of months, that we didn’t otherwise cover on the site.

Mathematical Discoveries

A newly discovered shape (ArXiV paper), described as a monostable tetrahedron, always lands the same way up – whatever orientation you place it in, gravity pulls it to the same place. There’s a write up in Quanta Magazine about it with some lovely videos. The write up mentions a lost physical model built in the 1980s, but it turns out Colin Wright has the model! Colin shares the story and some pictures in a blog post MonostableTetrahedron.



In other things-landing-on-particular-sides news, a new method for identifying stationary points of solids and the probabilities of resting at them has enabled the design of dice with target, non-uniform probabilities – and has been used to generate dice shaped like dragons, of course.

It’s now been confirmed that all the Mersenne numbers below M49 (three largest known Mersenne primes ago) have been checked and confirmed as being non-prime, so M49 is now definitely the 49th Mersenne prime.

The sixth Busy Beaver number, previously known to be greater than \(^{15}10\), has had its bounds improved – it’s really extremely big.

Up-and-coming mathematician Hanna Cairo has discovered a counterexample to Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a problem in harmonic analysis – here’s the ArXiV paper if you’d like to read it.

Quanta magazine also reports some new developments in sphere packing, on how to get increasingly dense packings in higher-dimensional space.

Other News

MathsWorldUK has announced in its latest newsletter (PDF) plans to launch a second maths discovery centre location, in London. Located in the heart of Southwark (not far from the Tate Modern), the new site MathsWorld promises to be “a vibrant playground for mathematical exploration”.

The five UK maths teaching associations are to merge – the The Association of Mathematics Education Teachers (AMET), the Association of Teachers of Mathematics (ATM), The Mathematical Association (MA), the National Association of Mathematics Advisers (NAMA) and the National Association for Numeracy and Mathematics in Colleges (NANAMIC) will henceforth be known as AMiE (the Association for Mathematics in Education).



Soccer team MK Dons are paying tribute to Bletchley Park Codebreakers with a new Enigma-themed away shirt, with a design of Enigma machine key caps (circles with letters in) in recognition of the work of codebreakers at the former stately home, close to their home ground.

Google’s Gemini Deep Think AI model has achieved gold-medal level performance at the International Mathematical Olympiad, having solved five out of the six IMO problems perfectly, and within the 4.5-hour time limit. Previous attempts have taken two to three days of computation, and this represents a significant improvement.

And finally, a piece of sad news: mathematician and musical satirist Tom Lehrer has died. We’d like to share our favourite Tom Lehrer quote: “Some of you may have had occasion to run into mathematicians and to wonder therefore how they got that way.”

Aperiodical News Roundup – April & May 2025

By Katie Steckles. Posted May 30, 2025

Here’s a round-up of all the mathematical news from the last couple of months we didn’t otherwise cover here.

Aperiodical News Roundup – March 2025

By Katie Steckles. Posted April 2, 2025

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.

Aperiodical News Roundup – Jan & Feb 2025

By Katie Steckles. Posted March 3, 2025

Here’s a round-up of a few news items from the last couple of months not otherwise covered on the site.

Aperiodical News Roundup – November & December 2024

By Katie Steckles. Posted January 11, 2025

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.