Here’s a round-up of some news we didn’t cover on the Aperiodical in the last couple of months.
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Aperiodical News Roundup – May 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)
Aperiodical News Roundup – March/April 2024
Here’s a round-up of mathematical news from the last couple of months.
Awards
The 2024 Abel Prize has been awarded to Michel Talagrand, “for his groundbreaking contributions to probability theory and functional analysis, with outstanding applications in mathematical physics and statistics.”
This year’s Turing Award has been given to Avi Wigderson, “for foundational contributions to the theory of computation, including reshaping our understanding of the role of randomness in computation, and for his decades of intellectual leadership in theoretical computer science.” Widgerson is a previous recipient of the Abel Prize.
Mathematical Discoveries
Nature magazine reports the discovery of a natural metabolic enzyme capable of forming Sierpiński triangles. Fractals are everywhere!
Quine’s New Foundations for set theory, in which the axiom of choice is false, has been formally proved in Lean to be consistent (PDF).
Another unreasonably effective application of maths: knot theory can be used to reveal points where spacecraft can switch between intersecting orbits using minimal fuel.
Other news
And finally, there have unfortunately been two deaths in maths education. First, maths education stalwart and generally lovely person Sue de Pomerai has died. Sue worked at MEI, FMSP and AMSP, and made a huge contribution to maths promotion in the UK. Also Hugh Burkhardt, pioneering mathematics education researcher and former Director of the Shell Centre for Mathematical Education.
Aperiodical News Roundup – February 2024
Here’s some mathematical news we didn’t otherwise cover this month.
Aperiodical News Roundup – January 2024
Here’s a round-up of some mathematical news stories not reported elsewhere on the site this month.
Maths News
Hiroki Takizawa claims Othello is solved: perfect play leads to a draw. (via Lance Fortnow)
Stephen Wolfram has announced version 14 of Mathematica, which will be available immediately both on the desktop and in the cloud. The latest version has 6602 built-in functions, and is accompanied by significant documentation and online tutorials to help people learn how to use it.
A new mathematical modelling competition, open from 1st Feb, invites predictions for when cherry trees will blossom in five cities in the USA and Japan, with cash and prizes awarded for a compelling narrative and reproducible analysis containing any data and code used. (via IMAmaths on X)
Science is reporting that a group of mathematicians are producing “low-quality papers” that repeatedly reference their work, distorting citation metrics apparently in an attempt to raise their institution’s rankings. As a result of this practice,
publishing analytics company Clarivate has excluded the entire field of math from the most recent edition of its influential list of authors of highly cited papers, released in November 2023.
(via Nalini Joshi on Mastodon)
Claire Voisin has been awarded the Crafoord Prize in Mathematics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences — the first woman to win this award in mathematics. (via European Mathematical Society on Mastodon)
Sad News
Several death announcements this month, including differential geometer Sigurður Helgason (via Nalini Joshi), Prof Nick Higham FRS, maths education giant Tony Gardiner (via Colin Wright) – and a lovely obituary of Tony from Sacha Borovik – Alan Schoen, physicist and discoverer of the gyroid (via Alison Martin), and Bernd Wegner, who was Editor-in-chief of zbMATH for 37 years (via European Mathematical Society).
Aperiodical News Roundup – December 2023
Here’s a round-up of a few newsy things we didn’t cover on the site in the month of December.
Aperiodical News Roundup – November 2023
Here’s a selection of mathematical news from the month of November that we didn’t otherwise mention on the site.
Proof News
The dream team of Tim Gowers, Ben Green, Freddie Manners and Terence Tao (pictured above) claim to have solved the polynomial Freiman-Ruzsa conjecture (originally conjectured by Hungarian mathematician Katalin Marton), which is described by Gil Kalai in this blog post as ‘the holy grail of additive combinatorics’. (via Terence Tao)
It’s claimed that the board game Othello has been solved: according to this arXiv paper, perfect play leads to a draw. (via Stephen Brooks)
Maths/politics
The UK Government has pledged “support to establish a National Academy focussed on mathematical sciences”. There has been a project to set up such an Academy as a recommendation from the Bond Review ‘The era of mathematics‘ in 2018, and it’s currently in a proto-setup phase.
Algorithmic trading firm XTX Markets has launched a $10m fund “designed to spur the creation of a publicly-shared AI model capable of winning a gold medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad”.
And finally
Ben Orlin has released a few interactive online versions of games from his book “Math Games With Bad Drawings”.