Here’s a round-up of some news from the last couple of months.
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- 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)
Aperiodical News Roundup – July 2026
Here’s a short round-up of maths news from this month.
The 2026 Fields medals have been awarded to Yu Deng, John Pardon, Jacob Tsimerman and Hong Wang. The Fields Medal is awarded to recognize outstanding mathematical achievement for existing work and for the promise of future achievement, and this year’s winners work across PDEs, symplectic geometry, algebraic geometry, harmonic analysis and measure theory.
Hannah Fry has been awarded the IMU’s Leelavati prize for increasing public awareness of maths. “She has become a voice for mathematics that resonates far beyond the public audience normally interested in science communication. Through a wide range of media – including books, videos, and television programs – she has used outstanding creativity and originality to translate mathematics into a language of wonder and relevance for the public without diminishing its scope and importance.”
A result in braid theory has been proven by a team including Joan Birman, aged 99. The proof “reveals brand new insights into the geometry of braids” and closes the \(n=4\) case of the long-standing question of whether the Burau representation of the braid group is faithful. (via @gregegansf@mathstodon.xyz)
The theme selected for the 2027 International Day of Mathematics is ‘Mathematics, AI and Our Future’. “The theme explores the role of mathematics as the foundation of artificial intelligence and how mathematical ideas shape one of today’s most transformative technologies.”
Aperiodical News Roundup – June 2026
Here’s a round-up of some news from this month not otherwise covered on the site.
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.