Card game fans might be familiar with the game of Dobble, in which a set of cards featuring symbols is laid out on the table, and family members tear each other’s hands off/eyes out in order to find the one symbol a given pair of cards has in common. Well, it’s now also available virtually!
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The Topological Tverberg Conjecture is False
Attention, Topological Combinatorialists! The topological Tverberg Conjecture, described as ‘a holy grail of topological combinatorics’, is false.
The conjecture says that any continuous map of a simplex of dimension $(r−1)(d+1)$ to $\mathbb{R}^d$ maps points from $r$ disjoint faces of the simplex to the same point in $\mathbb{R}^d$. In certain cases the conjecture has been proven true, but there have been found counterexamples in the case where $r$ is not a prime power, for sufficiently large values of $d$: the smallest counterexample found is for a map of the 100-dimensional simplex to $\mathbb{R}^{19}$, with $r=6$.
The result was recently unveiled at the Oberwolfach Maths Research Institute, which is situated in the Black Forest in Germany and regularly hosts bands of fiercely clever mathematicians. The disproof, by Florian Frick, is found in the paper Counterexamples to the Topological Tverberg Conjecture.
More Information
From Oberwolfach: The Topological Tverberg Conjecture is False, at Gil Kalai’s blog
Counterexamples to the Topological Tverberg Conjecture, by Florian Frick on the ArXiv
Florian Frick’s TU Berlin homepage
via Gil Kalai on Google+
Axis is Missile Command for mathematicians
Axis is a retro-styled game a bit like Missile Command crossed with a graphing calcuator. Instead of pointing a turret and trying to estimate a parabolic trajectory ending at one of your enemies, your shot follows the path of any function $y=f(x)$ you can think of.
Turing round-up, February 2015
I just want to be done with Alan Turing posts, but stuff keeps happening. Here’s a very brief round-up of some recent Turing news:
There’s a petition to Pardon all convicted gay men, not just Alan Turing. Sign it or don’t or write 12,000 words hemming and hawing about it all. Up to you.
This is actually really interesting: some “Banbury sheets”, invented by Alan Turing to make breaking naval Enigma codes go quicker (here’s some more info on how that works by Tony Sale) have been found stuffed in the roof of Hut 6 at Bletchley Park.
The UK government is putting together a mega-huge new Alan Turing Institute for Data Science, combining support from all sorts of universities and research organisations. The Guardian tells us that it’s going to be based at the British Library in London, while the Manchester Evening News laments that the University of Manchester, where Turing worked after the war, has not been selected to be an official part of the Institute.
What I think about Coordimate
(This post has been updated following an email from Ron Chinitz)
Here’s a new product vying to knock the set square off its throne as Least Useful Tool in the Pencil Case.
CoordiMate is a rubber stamp which prints a teeny tiny set of axes. It’s supposed to help you with your homework.
… for the week or two that you spend learning how to graph functions.
It’s currently the subject of a Kickstarter hoping to raise $25,000 so it can go into full production. Just watch this pitch video.
Happy Birthday, MAA!
With all the attention we’ve been giving the LMS’s 150th birthday celebrations, it’s only fair to note that the Mathematical Association of America is 100 this year.
The MAA is a fantastic organisation, as the famous maths people in this video testify:
As is the way of these things, there are events throughout the year to celebrate the MAA’s centennial; all the info is on the MAA’s website. The main event is the MAA’s annual MathFest, which is happening in Washington, D.C. at the start of August.
Three Sticks
The nice chaps at Kitki, an educational board game company based in India, have come up with a cool idea for a mathematical board game. They’re funding it through IndieGoGo (which if you haven’t heard of it is a bit like Kickstarter), and they’re looking for your help.