Since we know you’ll enjoy looking at some weird and wonderful illusion videos, we thought we’d share that the Best Illusion of the Year Contest has posted its 2021 finalists, and you can vote for the winner on their website.
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- Schools Writing Prize (11-15 category): Daria Gal (Notting Hill and Ealing High School, London) for ‘Mathematics and the mysterious world of creating gold’;
- Schools Writing Prize winner for 2021 (category 16-19): Carys Williams (Monmouth School for Girls, UK) for ‘A story of secrecy and security: the key to unlocking prime numbers’;
- Undergraduate Prize winners, jointly: Ellen Flower (Oxford University) for ‘The “analysis” of a century: Influences on the etymological development of the word “analysis” in a mathematical context to 1750’ and George Waters (London School of Economics) for ‘Exploring the use of mathematics to obtain consensus’.
Aperiodical News Roundup – November 2021
Here’s a roundup of some of the news stories from the world of maths in the month of November.
Events
Eugenie Hunsicker and collaborators have produced a film entitled “Words of Women in Mathematics in the Time of Corona”, which raises awareness of the impact of the pandemic on women in mathematics.
The QE Prize for Engineering’s ‘Month of Making’, as featured previously in a post announcing the start, is well under way and continues until 12th December, with scientific, mathematical and engineeringy ideas for make-it-yourself gifts every day.
This month saw the official launch of MathsCity Leeds, as previously covered in this review by hands-on discovery centre correspondent Peter and his son.
![Photo of MathsWorldUK Committee and Support Team in the discovery centre, with Katie and Paul watching an interactive demonstration of pendulums in the background top right](https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/p.ublished/media2/2021/nov/62673/CV4140_MathsCity_211118.jpg)
Leading mathematicians, council members, and key professionals from tourist attractions and universities across the country were just some of the guests that attended the bustling launch party last night for the UK’s first maths discovery centre. […] Celebrating the milestone achievement by the pioneering charity MathsWorldUK, the MathsCity launch was an opportunity to show donors, supporters, and future investors why the innovative new attraction that opened its doors in Leeds City Centre last month is so important for the future.
North East Post
Attempts to start a proof assistants stack exchange have been successful, and the Stack Exchange team are “are preparing for its launch and expect to create it soon”. (via Andrej Bauer)
A new paper has been published in Nature about the use of machine learning in pure maths research. This isn’t machine learning making new maths, but rather it’s pitched as a collaboration between mathematician and machine – the authors argue that machine learning can be used “to guide intuition and propose conjectures”. The paper gives some examples of new fundamental results in pure mathematics that have been discovered with the assistance of machine learning.
Open Calls
![How maths helps people - Poster Ccompetition. Photos of the earth from space, a syringe, a brush fire, a crowd and a whale. www.mathscareers.org.uk. IMA and Maths Careers logo.](https://www.mathscareers.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Slide1.jpg)
The IMA has launched a poster competition called How Maths Helps People, in which high school students are asked to design an A4 “persuasive poster which shows how maths can be used to help people”. The poster should be aimed at high school students, and students with winning posters in each age group will receive an Android tablet. The closing date is 31st January 2022.
![A photograph of a group of young researchers, standing in a modern building, grouped around a seated old bearded internet evangelist](https://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/fileadmin/_processed_/d/a/csm_teaser_2nd_hlf_2014_program_57bf181631.jpg?1638543674303)
The LMS has announced its annual call for nominations for its 2022 prizes, which are awarded in various categories for mathematical research, innovation and exposition.
Recreational Maths Magazine has issued a call for proposals for its upcoming π-themed issue, which will be their first specially themed issue. Calls close on 14th March 2022 (obviously).
The Heidelberg Laureate Forum, which takes place in September in Heidelberg, Germany, and brings together top-level maths laureates with young researchers for a week of lectures, workshops and networking has announced that applications for young researchers to attend HLF 2022 are now open. If you know any PhD or postdoc mathematicians who would like a chance to meet some cool people and have a great trip to Germany, encourage them to apply!
QEPrize’s Month of Making
The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering celebrates innovation in engineering with an annual prize awarded to some of the world’s top engineers. Starting today, the QEPrize YouTube channel will be hosting a Month of Making, with a video each day supplied by a different STEM person (including some mathematicians!), encouraging you to make, instead of buy, at least one Christmas present this year.
The month has been organised by physics teacher and STEM communicator Alom Shaha (who recently featured on our Mathematical Objects podcast). Alom says:
I want other people to experience the joy I find in “making” by encouraging them to make stuff for the people in their lives. Christmas feels like the perfect time to do this and, with the help of the people behind the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, I’ve somehow managed to recruit a bunch of incredibly creative and talented people to share some ideas for things you could make. Over the course of the next month or so, from 15 November to 12 December, we’ll be publishing a series of videos with simple instructions for making a range of gifts, from simple machines to pieces of jewellery.
There’s also a competition running to win a copy of Alom’s book, Mr Shaha’s Marvellous Machines, for anyone who makes one of the suggested gifts and shares a photo or video of it with the hashtag #AMonthOfMaking.
More information
QEPrize Supports ‘A Month of Making’ for more sustainable Christmas presents (press release)
Month of Making website: qeprize.org/a-month-of-making
Aperiodical News Roundup – October 2021
Here’s all the latest, and slightly later, news from the past month.
Awards & Prizes
Mathematician Professor Christina Pagel has been given a Special Recognition Award for Public Engagement in Science during the Covid 19 Pandemic by the BMJ (British Medical Journal). Throughout the pandemic, she’s been explaining and interpreting scientific papers, data, and news reports, helping to boost understanding and transparency through in-depth Twitter threads, TV news appearances and pieces in and print and online media.
BMJ website list of winners – UCL press release
A new £560 million numeracy scheme, ‘Multiply’, has been announced as part of the recent budget to support up to 500,000 adults with low numeracy. The scheme includes free courses for adults without a GCSE Grade C/4 in maths, and programmes for employers to bring in training for at-work qualifications.
National Numeracy press release – Information on Government Education Hub
Events
The annual Big MathsJam Gathering will be taking place online on the weekend of 20th & 21st November, and bookings will open imminently – head to the Gathering website to add yourself to the list to be notified when it does. Tickets will cost £10 (£5 unwaged) for a weekend of talks, discussion, sharing and puzzles on spatial audio platform Gather.town. As well as thinking about what you might like to submit a 5-minute talk about, you can prepare for the MathsJam activities including a mathematical bakeoff, a Competition Competition and the MathsJam Jam sing-a-long, which this year will involve recording yourself singing a track along with others, to listen back to the combined recordings on the day – details on the website, with a submission deadline of 12th November.
![Mathigon website header, showing a book open with a large number of mathematical objects spilling out including a mobius band, sunflower, playing cards, various polyhedra and polyominoes, a ruler and compass and dice. The background looks like space.](https://aperiodical.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/image-2-1024x461.png)
Excellent maths interactives website and online ‘textbook of the future’ Mathigon has been acquired by US education publisher Amplify. According to the Mathigon press release, “Mathigon’s beautiful, interactive online learning platform will continue to be offered for free and will strengthen Amplify’s math offerings.”
Maths News
![Queen Elizabeth Chess Moves | Know Your Meme](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/mobile/000/028/543/queen.jpg)
Quanta Magazine reports, beautifully as always, that there’s been some progress on the n-Queens problem, which is about finding how many different ways queens can be placed on a chessboard so that none attack each other. Since the problem is difficult to simplify, it’s historically been a case of crunching through all the possibilities, but the new breakthrough pinpoints the number of positions on an n-by-n board by sandwiching it between upper and lower bounds that now coincide.
According to Science News, “An elusive equation describing bird eggs of all shapes has been found at last”. Now, if you simply know the egg’s length, its maximum breadth, its diameter at the spot where its pointed end terminates and the location of its maximum diameter in relationship to the midpoint of its length, you can calculate its volume. An elusive equation describing bird eggs of all shapes has been found at last, on Science News (via Rachel Crowell)
Aperiodical News Roundup – September 2021
Here’s a collection of some things that have been happening (and will be happening) in maths this month (and next month).
Awards
The British Society for the History of Mathematics have announced their annual Neil Bibby Awards, which have been awarded to Ciarán Mac an Bhaird and Michael Barany. The award winners receive £400 each, and will be expected to deliver some schools talks and produce resources for the BHSM website. More information about the Bibby Awards can be found on the BSHM website. (via @MathsHistory on Twitter).
The British Society for the History of Mathematics have also announced the winners of their annual schools and undergraduate essay prizes:
These winners and the runners up for each prize are announced in this Twitter thread: “Our Schools and Undergraduate Prizes announcements!!!”.
![Money, Dollars, Sack, Bag, Icon, Bag Of Money](https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2020/10/17/12/48/money-5661927_960_720.png)
Carnegie Mellon University has been gifted $20 million by blockchain pioneer Charles Hoskinson to establish the Hoskinson Center for Formal Mathematics. The center will be part of Dietrich College and will “advance mathematical research by improving global access to knowledge and resources for mathematics researchers, educators and learners”. For more information read the press release here. (via @KevinZollman on Twitter).
Events
This coming Ada Lovelace Day, Tuesday 12 October, the organisers of Ada Lovelace Day live are putting on a series of online webinars on topics including engineering, tech and games, and the science of hypersleep. Tickets are free, and the events will be streamed live on YouTube and Facebook.
School student stage show outfit Maths Inspiration are putting on a special online show during COP26, themed around the mathematics of climate. Schools can pay a flat fee of £75+VAT to have as many students as they want join and watch live, and speakers include Matt Parker, Sammie Buzzard and Hugh Hunt. (via @MathsInspiratn on Twitter).
![Screenshot from the MathsCity website, with text: 'EXPLORE - DISCOVER - SOLVE; MathsCity is the home of hands-on maths, located in the heart of Leeds. Coming soon to Trinity Leeds, the UK's first Mathematics Discovery Centre.'](https://aperiodical.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/image-5.png)
It’s finally happening! The UK’s first hands-on maths discovery centre, MathsCity, will be opening in Leeds on 5th October. Open from 10am-5pm Tuesday-Sunday, in Leeds Trinity Shopping Centre, the mathematical wonderland will include giant bubbles, a laser ‘ring of fire’ and puzzles to solve. Go go go! (via @MathsCityLeeds on Twitter).
On 15th October, the Royal Irish Academy is hosting the Hamilton Lecture 2021, featuring Professor Caroline Series, who’ll be talking about Glimpses in Hyperbolic Geometry. The lecture will take place online, followed by a Q&A, and tickets are free but booking is required. And look, they did such a cool poster (above)!
Aperiodical News Roundup – August and half of September 2021
Here’s a round-up of mathematical and maths-adjacent things that happened in the world this month-and-a-half.
Mathematical News
New record calculation of π – a team in Switzerland have calculated π to a record accuracy of 62.8 trillion digits (that’s around 10 tau trillion – a masterful troll). For more background, read New mathematical record: what’s the point of calculating pi? in the Guardian, which strikes a nice balance between understanding that π is important but that this kind of record-setting is largely stamp collecting.
![Illustration showing a graph against a purple background, with certain vertices and edges highlighted in orange.](https://d2r55xnwy6nx47.cloudfront.net/uploads/2021/05/Odd_graph_2880x1660_Lede.jpg)
Odd subgraphs result – There’s also a nice writeup in Quanta of a new proof confirming a fact about odd graphs (that every graph has a subgraph at least $\frac{1}{10000}$ of its own size that contains entirely odd vertices).
P vs NP proof – Logician Martin Dowd is claiming a proof of P≠NP “using a Godel diagonalization argument involving representing formulas”. As per @HigherGeometer’s tweet, mathematicians will be looking for the ‘nearly inevitable slip’, and we’ll report it here if we notice an announcement, probably.
Prime Gap now down to 20 – Another claimed proof, this time by arithmetic geometer Chunlei Liu, confirming that there are infinitely many primes at most 20 apart – an improvement on prior work by Zhang/Polymath8/Tao/Maynard, and using a similar method.
Events & Awards
Awards news – This year’s Royal Society Medals have been awarded, and recipients include Prof. Frances Kirwan who has been awarded the Sylvester Medal “for her research on quotients in algebraic geometry, including links with symplectic geometry and topology, which has had many applications”, and Prof. June Barrow-Green who receives the Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal and Lecture “for her research in 19th and 20th century mathematics, notably on historical roots of modern computing, dynamical systems and the three-body problem. Her work places special emphasis on the under-representation of women in historical narratives and in contemporary mathematics.”
![Photo of Prof. Frances Kirwan in a lecture theatre, beside a photo of Prof. June Barrow-Green next to a mathematical sculpture](https://aperiodical.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/image-2-1024x652.png)
Maths competition award nominations – The World Federation of National Mathematics Competitions has put out a call for nominations for the Erdos Award 2022, which recognises the contributions of “mathematicians who have played a significant role in the development of mathematical challenges at the national or international level and which have been a stimulus for the enrichment of mathematics learning”. If you know someone who runs maths competitions and deserves an award, it’d be great to see some more UK winners!
Win a free Schools Workshop – ICMS and Maths Week Scotland are excited to announce a 2021 School Workshop competition, in which Scottish secondary schools can register themselves on the Maths Week Scotland website and enter to win an interactive virtual maths workshop delivered by Ben Sparks or Katie Steckles (that’s me), during Maths Week Scotland.
And Finally
Nira vs Specsavers – We previously reported on Nira Chamberlain’s social media crusades to stop brands from being flippant about maths – and it looks like he’s had some more success. Following his complaint about an unhelpful leaflet put out by Specsavers (in which algebra was described as ‘silly’ and used as a throwaway example of something hard) they’ve responded to him personally and withdrawn the leaflet.
Gathering For Gardner is postponed again – with a heavy heart, the organisers of Gathering For Gardner 14 have made the tough call, in light of “the continuing worsening of the COVID-19 situation in Georgia, with record-breaking numbers of infections, and an increase in hospitalizations throughout the state”, to postpone this year’s event to 2022. Tickets already booked can be transferred to next year’s event or fully refunded.
Clopen Mic Night – new online maths variety show
The team that brought you the 24 Hour Maths Magic Show last October are at it again, and are planning a semi-regular evening YouTube variety show called Clopen Mic Night, with short segments from a selection of mathematical guests, including comedy, music, demonstrations, magic, puzzles and art, showcasing some top maths communicators and hopefully providing a fun night in. The event is supported by Talking Maths in Public, a network for maths communicators based in the UK, and this first show will take place alongside their 2021 conference event.
It’s called Clopen Mic Night because it’s both an open mic night (in the sense that you’ll see a variety of different people doing different things) and a closed mic night (in that the organisers curate the line-up to ensure a variety of quality acts). If you’ve not encountered the concept of a clopen set, it describes a set that is both open and closed. Usually things are clopen for tedious technical reasons – the empty set and the whole set are both trivially clopen, and most interesting examples crop up in awkwardly-defined sets with non-standard topologies and distance metrics.
The first event is taking place on Thursday 26th August, from 8-9pm, on my YouTube channel, and you can watch along for free, join in with the chat, and drop a coin in our virtual tip bucket if you like what you see. This will hopefully be the first of many such shows (assuming it all goes well!) and for future shows we’ll be looking for acts to join us – anyone participating will also be able to get advice and feedback on their bit in various ways, and we’re hoping it’ll be a chance for people to try out fun new material and showcase the best maths communication has to offer.
For more information about the show, including the lineup for this first event, you can visit the Clopen Mic Night website and sign up for a reminder before each show so you don’t miss it. For updates on future events and how to apply to perform (once that becomes a thing), check the @ClopenMic twitter account.