Here’s some mathematical news we didn’t otherwise cover this month.
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- Kenneth Falconer, Regius Professor of Mathematics at the University of St Andrews, appointed CBE for services to mathematics.
- Roger Heath-Brown, Emeritus Fellow, University of Oxford, appointed OBE for services to mathematics and mathematical research.
- Colva Roney-Dougal, Professor of Mathematics, University of St Andrews, appointed OBE for services to education and mathematics.
- Chris Smith, teacher of mathematics at Grange Academy, Kilmarnock, appointed MBE for services to mathematics education and to the community in East Ayrshire.
- Steven Underwood, lately mathematics teacher at Ryedale School, Beadlam, North Yorkshire, appointed MBE for services to Education
- Laura Dawson (Laura Gilbert), Director of Data Science in the Prime Minister’s Office, appointed CBE for services to technology and analysis.
- Thomas Critchley, Data Scientist, Prime Minister’s Office, appointed OBE for services to evidence-based policy.
- Tori Olphin, Chief Data Scientist and Head of Research, Thames Valley Police, appointed MBE for services to technology in the public sector.
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.
Particularly mathematical New Years Honours 2024
The UK Government have announced the latest list of honours, and we’ve taken a look for the particularly mathematical entries. Here is the selection for this year – if you spot any more, let us know in the comments and we’ll add to the list.
Get the full list from gov.uk.
As well as the New Year Honours, another list has been published – Liz Truss’s Resignation Honours. This list includes a damehood for Shirley Conran for services to mathematics education as founder of the Maths Anxiety Trust.
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”.
21X competition – results
A while ago we announced a competition to win a copy of algebraic blackjack game 21X, which was recently successful on Kickstarter, smashing its funding target by an order of magnitude. If you’d like to pre-order a copy of the game, you can sign up to be notified when that’s possible.
We had over 30 entries in the competition, of which 20 achieved correct answers, and have picked a random set of winners to pass on to Naylor Games, who should be in touch with them by email in the next few days.
For anyone interested in seeing the answers, here’s what they were. As a reminder, the challenge here is to find a value for \(x\), given that \(n\) represents the number of cards, to get the total of all the card values closest to 21.
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).