Here’s some mathematical news we didn’t otherwise cover this month.
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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”.
Aperiodical News Roundup – October 2023
Here’s a round-up of a few things that happened this month that we didn’t otherwise cover here.
The Salem Prize for 2023, given annually to young mathematicians judged to have done outstanding work on harmonic analysis and related topics, has been awarded to Sarah Peluse and Julian Sahasrabudhe. (via Terence Tao)
According to this recent arXiv paper, data from 350,757 coin flips supports Persi Diaconis’ model of coin tossing, which estimates the probability of a coin landing on the same side it started at a surprising 51%. (via Alex Corner, Sheffield Hallam University)
Statistician C. R. Rao, who pioneered powerful statistical methods that underpin modern scientific data analyses, has died. (via Raul Jimenez)
And finally, the newly* discovered aperiodic monotile, which we won’t stop going on about ever, has been chosen as one of Time’s 200 Best Inventions of 2023 (via the European Mathematical Society).
Aperiodical News Roundup – September 2023
Here’s a roundup of some things that happened in September 2023 that you may have missed.
Aperiodical News Roundup – August 2023
Here’s a selection of mathematical stories that crossed our desk in August.
Maths Research News
Researchers have discovered that a shape can be designed to trace almost any infinite periodic trajectory when rolling down a slope, as seen in this Nature.com video (via Jeroen van Dorp)
A new diamond open access journal, Innovations in Graph Theory, has been founded. The first issue of the journal is expected to appear in 2024. (via Peter Cameron)
And in important publication news for silly season: Erik Demaine and Martin Demaine have achieved “the true ideal of an unordered set of equal authors, where every author comes first”. Their paper Every Author as First Author proposes a new standard for writing author names on papers and in bibliographies, which places every author as a first author, with the names all superimposed on top of each other, including details of the \namestack LaTeX command for this purpose. The results are predictably hilarious (see below). (via Nalini Joshi)
![Screenshot from paper: "being equal. In our own writing, we try to avoid this practice, and instead write all authors' surnames whenever citing a paper, e.g., "X, Y, and Z [#]". But this workaround becomes impractical for references with over a dozen authors, such as some of our papers (*incomprehensible black smear of overlaid names* 2020; *incomprehensible black smear* 2020) or some papers in astronomy (*incomprehensible black smear* 2006) and biology (*incomprehensible black smear* 2001)."](https://aperiodical.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/image-9.png)
Other News
Alison Kiddle has been posting daily conversation prompts involving LEGO to stimulate mathematical thinking on their blog every day in August, and people have been responding on Twitter and Mastodon.
Mathematician and logician Peter Aczel has died, as has Ian G. Macdonald (who introduced Macdonald polynomials).