The IMA turns 50 this year, and is holding two celebration events and publishing a book.
You're reading: News
Oh, Stephen
“It is hugely complicated. In fact, compared to football I think Quantum Physics is relatively straightforward.”
– Professor Stephen Hawking
Even you, Stephen?
If you pick up basically any newspaper in Ireland or the UK today, you’ll probably find a story about Professor Stephen Hawking’s “formula for World Cup success”. At first glance, it doesn’t look good: The World’s Most Famous Scientist appears finally to have succumbed to the temptation of nonsense formula publicity.
Vi Hart has 3D printed a hypercube made of monkeys that has the symmetries of the Quaternion group
Group theorists, often interested principally in the abstract, have been known to neglect the vital importance of producing funky gizmos that exhibit the symmetries they have theorized about. Internet maths celeb Vi Hart, working with mathematician Henry Segerman, has addressed this absence in the case of $Q_8$, the quaternion group. The object they’ve designed is four-dimensional and made of monkeys, and they’ve done the closest thing possible to making one, which is to 3D-print an embedding of it into our three-dimensional universe, also made of monkeys. Their ArXiv preprint (pdf) is well worth a read, and when you get to the photos of the resulting sculpture (entitled “More fun than a hypercube of monkeys”), you’ll fall off your chair.
Further reading
The Quaternion Group as a Symmetry Group by Vi Hart and Henry Segerman, on the ArXiv.
Nothing Is More Fun than a Hypercube of Monkeys at Roots of Unity, including an animated gif of a virtual version of the sculpture rotating through 4D-space.
Google Doodle: The Witch of Agnesi
Today’s Google doodle (for those not in the know, the Google homepage alters its header based on the date, and on dates of special nerdy significance, they theme them around relevant birthdays/anniversaries) is about Maria Gaetana Agnesi, a female mathematician. Agnesi was born on 16th May 1718, making today her 296th birthday. This means you have four years to prepare for her 300th birthday bash, which I hear is going to go off big style.
Primo: now a colourful, actual mathematical board game
Primo, a board game which puts the ‘fun’ in the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, has now been successfully funded via Kickstarter. In a recent blog post, the creators Katherine Cook and Daniel Finkel boast:
The game plays beautifully in play test after play test. It’s one of the most mathematically rich games we have ever seen, and at the same time avoids that icky “educational game” feel. Primo is a real game and it’s worth playing because it’s fun. Really fun.
Make math ¬ war: American military invests in homotopy type theory
The Homotopy Type Theory book was an ambitious attempt to relay the foundations of maths on a combination of type theory and topology. It also makes heavy use of computer proof-checking, which might be why the US Department of Defense is interested in it: they’ve just given Carnegie Mellon University’s Steve Awodey $7.5 million to continue the project.
Here’s a snippet from the press release announcing the grant:
The MURI [Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative] award, officially entitled “Homotopy Type Theory: Unified Foundations of Mathematics and Computation,” is through the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. It will establish CMU as the international center of research in this new field, which uses a fusion of tools drawn from abstract mathematics, such as homotopy and category theory, and the powerful computational paradigms of type theory and program verification. The resulting new, computational foundation for mathematics is not only an important theoretical advance. It also promises to provide a useful practical tool for mathematicians and other scientists in the form of powerful computer systems that can automatically verify the correctness of large and complex mathematical proofs and organize and unify a large body of verified mathematical theory in a form that can be reused for other scientific purposes. Equally important is the promise of new applications in theoretical computer science through the use of abstract geometrical intuitions and methods.
More information
“Really Big Numbers” by Richard Evan Schwartz, the AMS’s first book for children
The American Mathematical Society has published its first book for children. It’s called Really Big Numbers.
They’ve made a rather pleasant trailer for it.
[youtube url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEOY9UAsCFM]
It made me want to wait for the audiobook version: author Richard Evan Schwartz has a soothing Bob Ross-like voice. (Edit: turns out the voice is Alexander Dupuis)
Really Big Numbers will be available from the AMS from the 12th of May, priced $25.