One positive effect of the various lock-downs in place around the world is the sudden emergence of massive numbers of online seminars and talks. The site Math Seminars, developed by a team at MIT and currently in beta, holds a list of upcoming one-off talks and seminar series.
Mathematician John Horton Conway, a professor at both the University of Cambridge and Princeton University, and the originator of hundreds of lovely and clever maths things, has died at the age of 82.
Eight years after Shinichi Mochizuki first posted his proof of the ABC Conjecture on his website it has been announced that it has been accepted for publication in Publications of the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences (RIMS).
The Abel Prize for 2020 has been awarded to two mathematicians – Hillel Furstenberg and Gregory Margulis, for their work in “pioneering the use of methods from probability and dynamics in group theory, number theory and combinatorics”.
We’re greatly saddened to hear of the death of Richard K. Guy yesterday morning. He was 103.
Richard K. Guy was a prolific collaborator. He co-authored four papers with Paul Erdős, worked frequently with John H. Conway and Elwyn Berlekamp, and was a frequent contributor to Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games column.
The most well-known of Guy’s discoveries is the glider in Conway’s Game of Life.
He described himself as an amateur mathematician, often tackling problems that are best described as ‘recreational mathematics’. His work was not restricted to one area of maths, but often involved a combinatoric aspect.
Recreational mathematics occupied Guy’s mind for much longer than a normal lifetime, so you’ll have to take your pick from his bibliography. Fortunately, many of the problems and ideas that Guy wrote about can be tackled independently. The Nesting and Roosting Habits of the Laddered Parenthesis and The Number-Pad Game are two typical examples.
Two of the most approachable of Guy’s books are Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays, written with John H. Conway and Elwyn Berlekamp, and The Book of Numbers, written with John H. Conway.
We wrote a post on Guy’s 100th birthday, and the University of Calgary set up a page celebrating his life. Colm Mulcahy also wrote a long post summing up Guy’s first 100 years in his MAA blog.
Guy’s final book, The Unity of Combinatorics, co-authored with Ezra Brown, is due out in May from MAA Press.
Mathematician Katherine Johnson has died at the age of 101. She calculated rocket trajectories and orbits for early NASA space flights, including the missions that sent the first American in space, the first American to orbit the Earth and the first men to walk on the Moon, as well as contributing early work on the Shuttle program and many other areas. She was one of the women featured in the book and film Hidden Figures in 2016.
Ada Lovelace Day (which is much more than just a day) is fundraising.