Here’s a round-up of some stories from what’s now terrifyingly last year.
You're reading: News
- Howard Groves, Member, Senior Mathematical Challenge Problems Group and Member, UK Mathematics Trust Challenges Sub Trust. MBE, for services to Education.
- Christl Donnelly FRS, Professor of Statistical Epidemiology, Imperial College London. CBE, for services to Epidemiology and the Control of Infectious Diseases.
- Ben Goldacre, Senior Clinical Research Fellow, Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, University of Oxford and author of Bad Science. MBE, for services to Evidence in Policy.
- Andrew Morris, Professor of Medicine, Director of the Usher Institute of Population Health Sciences and Informatics, and Vice-Principal Data Science, University of Edinburgh. CBE, for services to Science in Scotland.
- Stephen Sparks, lately Professorial Research Fellow, University of Bristol and former chair of ACME. Knighthood, for services to Volcanology and Geology. (Via The Mathematical Association.)
- Bernard Silverman, lately Chief Scientific Adviser, Home Office and former President of the Royal Statistical Society (RSS). Knighthood, for public service and services to Science. (Via Hetan Shah.)
- John Curtice, Professor of Politics, University of Strathclyde and Senior Research Fellow, NatCen Social Research, and Honorary Fellow, RSS. Knighthood, for services to the Social Sciences and Politics. (Via Hetan Shah.)
- Diane Coyle, Professor of Economics, University of Manchester. CBE, for services to Economics and the Public Understanding of Economics. (Via Hetan Shah.)
$2^{77,232,917}-1$ is the new $2^{74,207,281}-1$
We now know 50 Mersenne primes! The latest indivisible mammoth, $2^{77,232,917}-1$, was discovered by Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search user Jonathan Pace on the 26th of December 2017. As well as being the biggest Mersenne prime ever known, it’s also the biggest prime of any sort discovered to date.
GIMPS works by distributing the job of checking candidate numbers for primality to computers running the software around the world. It took over six days of computing to prove that this number is prime, which has since been verified on four other systems.
Pace, a 51-year old Electrical Engineer from Tennessee, has been running the GIMPS software to look for primes for over 14 years, and has been rewarded with a \$3,000 prize. When a prime with over 100 million digits is found, the discoverer will earn a \$50,000 prize. That probably won’t be for quite a while: this new prime has $23{,}249{,}425$ decimal digits, just under a million more than the previous biggest prime, discovered in 2016.
If you’re really interested, the entire decimal representation of the number can be found in a 10MB ZIP file hosted at mersenne.org. Spoiler: it begins with a 4.
More information: press release at mersenne.org, home of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search.
Particularly mathematical New Years Honours 2018
When the UK Government announces a new list of honours, we (let’s be honest – sometimes) write up a list of those particularly mathematical entries. Here is the selection for the 2018 New Years Honours list.
Get the full list here. If you spot any others we should mention, please let us know in the comments.
AMS Communication Awards
![Photo of Vi Hart: M Eifler, 2017 (CC by 4.0). Photo of Matt Parker: Steve Ullathorne](http://www.ams.org/images/JPBM-Comm-2018-Photo.jpg)
Photo of Vi Hart: M Eifler, 2017 (CC by 4.0). Photo of Matt Parker: Steve Ullathorne
The American Math Society’s Joint Policy Board for Mathematics has announced the winners of its 2018 Communication award. This year’s winners are internet maths wizard/YouTube star Vi Hart, and Aperiodipal and Stand-up Mathematician Matt Parker.
Both produce brilliant, enjoyable and illuminating mathematical videos (Vi Hart, Matt Parker), as well as numerous other projects – Vi Hart has worked with Khan Academy, produced online interactive mathematical stories, and done some super work on hyperbolic/4D virtual reality, while Parker performs with science comedy team Festival of the Spoken Nerd, has started the MathsJam pub maths movement, has written a popular maths book, and appears regularly on TV and radio.
The award includes a prize of $2,000, and aims to encourage high-quality communicators of mathematics. We think they’ve made a good choice!
More information
News post on the AMS website
About the AMS JPBM Communication prize
2018 Christopher Zeeman Medal nominations open
The IMA/LMS Zeeman Medal has been awarded every two years since 2008, to an individual, to “recognise and acknowledge the contributions of mathematicians involved in promoting mathematics to the public and engaging with the public in mathematics in the UK, and demonstrate that such activities are valued by the societies and the mathematical community at large and are a part of a mathematician’s roles and responsibilities”. The nomination process is now open for 2018, and details of eligibility and how to make a nomination are at the link below.
Alan Turing Cryptography Competitions open as of 1st December
The University of Manchester’s annual Alan Turing Cryptography Competition and MathsBombe Competition are now open for registration. Now in its seventh year, the Alan Turing Cryptography Competition is for year 11 and below in England and Wales, S4 in Scotland and Year 12 in N. Ireland. There’s also a competition for older students – MathsBombe is open to year 13 and below in England and Wales, S6 in Scotland and Year 14 in N. Ireland.
Every one to two weeks a new chapter of the six-chapter story is released, and each chapter has a new cryptographic puzzle to solve. Teams consisting of up to four people can win prizes for being the first to solve each puzzle, and also for being randomly picked from all correct entries for each puzzle.
The Alan Turing Cryptography Competition begins on Monday 15th January 2018, with MathsBombe starting on Wednesday 10th January 2018. For more information and to enter, visit the Cryptography Competition website or MathsBombe website.
Not Mentioned on The Aperiodical, November 2017
Here’s a round-up of a few news stories we’ve not had chance to write about this month.