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).
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Aperiodical News Roundup – June & July 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
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
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
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
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.
Aperiodical News Roundup – October 2024
Here’s a roundup of some of the maths-related news from this month we didn’t otherwise cover here!