Next week, scientists, science fans and science communicators will converge on Cheltenham town hall for a week of high-quality science festival. But how much of the programme is given over to the queen of all sciences, Mathematics? Here’s a list of some of the events going on we’d be interested in going to.
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Four silly stories
Silly maths stories, like buses with a taxi sneaking into the bus lane behind them, come along four at a time, it seems. None of these stories merits being reported on here on its own, but we felt the fact that they all came to our attention so close to each other deserved recognition.
A new model theory blog: Forking, Forcing and back&Forthing
Mathematical niche-filling news: a few model and set theorists have got together to start a new shared blog “on that hard to define area that is perhaps 80% Model Theory and 20% Set Theory”.
It’s wittily called fff, short for Forking, Forcing and back&Forthing ((Reminds me of the old joke a biologist told me: “the hyptothalamus controls the four Fs: fighting; fleeing; feeding; and reproduction. Anyway, forking, forcing, and back&forthing are all terms from model and set theory)), and it’s run by Andrés Caicedo, Juan Diego Caycedo, Artem Chernikov, John Goodrick, Ayhan Günaydın, Goyo Mijares, Sonat Suer, Andrés Villaveces.
The new blog is inspired by communal-blogging trailblazers the Secret Blogging Seminar, started by some Berkeley PhD students, and the n-Category Café, run by a mixture of category theorists, physicists and philosophers. The fff chaps explain themselves thus:
… a group of Model Theorists and Set Theorists have decided to put up a blog to explain to ourselves (and whoever reads this) why some result we just submitted to a journal is interesting, why some “classical” theorem (or definition, or notion, or example) is worth revisiting, what is our view on some discussion, what on earth is “such and such fancy concept”.
The blog: fff (Forking, Forcing and back&Forthing)
via Richard Elwes on Google+
Mathagogy: two-minute mathematics education
In ‘asking people on the internet to do things for you’ news: mathagogy.com is asking for submissions from teachers of two-minute videos, describing how they would approach teaching a particular aspect of mathematics.
Peps Mccrea makes the pitch in this positively fleeting 69 second video:
[youtube url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVXyrFQY4dk]
Submit a video at mathagogy.com
via Johnathan Gregg on Twitter
“Bounded gaps between primes” by Yitang Zhang now available
To complete the story started as a rumour report in ‘Primes gotta stick together‘ and confirmed in ‘Primes really do stick together‘, here we report that Annals of Mathematics has posted the PDF of ‘Bounded gaps between primes‘ by Yitang Zhang on its ‘to appear in forthcoming issues’ page. After the seminar on 13th May, Zhang apparently submitted a revised manuscript on 16 May, which was accepted 21 May 2013. So if you’ve been itching for details, here’s your chance (assuming you have access to a subscription to Annals).
Here’s the abstract:
It is proved that \[ \liminf_{n\to \infty}\, (p_{n+1} – p_n) < 7 \times 10^7 \text{,}\] where $p_n$ is the $n$-th prime.
Our method is a refinement of the recent work of Goldston, Pintz and Yildirim on the small gaps between consecutive primes. A major ingredient of the proof is a stronger version of the Bombieri-Vinogradov theorem that is applicable when the moduli are free from large prime divisors only (see Theorem 2), but it is adequate for our purpose.
The paper: Bounded gaps between primes by Yitang Zhang, in Annals of Mathematics.
Cream(t)
This just in! Important research from mathematicians at the university of Sheffield (in particular, category theorist Eugenia Cheng) has determined the correct proportions of jam and cream to use when creating a jam and cream scone. As the Aperiodical’s cake correspondent, my duty is to report these significant results.
Elsevier one year on: “essentially nothing has changed”
A new post on Gowers’s Weblog gives, with permission, a letter of resignation from the editorial board of Elsevier’s Journal of Number Theory sent by Greg Martin. Gowers promises that the letter makes “interesting reading”, and he’s right.
Martin points out that it has been over a year since the Elsevier boycott began (covered on this site in the Open Access Update of 25th of May). The boycott currently claims 13,656 researchers have signed up. Martin says that the boycott caused “a flurry of communication back and forth between Elsevier and our editorial board (and those of other journals, I’m sure)”, but, he says “now the dust has settled, and I must conclude that essentially nothing has changed”.
In an interesting letter, Martin reflects on the original Gowers blog post, and on the Elsevier reaction to it, including a proposal to pay a fee to editors for processing articles (Martin says, “we want access to be less expensive; we’re not looking for extra dough in our pockets”).
Read the letter: Elsevier journals: has anything changed?