Pretty big book news (in a couple of ways)! The Univalent Foundations Program at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton has released a 470-page textbook resetting the foundations of mathematics on homotopy type theory. It’s called Homotopy Type Theory: Univalent Foundations of Mathematics.
The Birthday Honours 2013 have been announced, and an extensive list has been posted on Wikipedia. The big name is Andrew Dilnot, Chair of the UK Statistics Authority and inaugural presenter of More or Less, who is knighted “for services to Economics and Economic Policy”. Apart from this, the list on Wikipedia contains one other mention of maths or stats that I spotted, John C. Butcher, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Auckland, was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit “for services to mathematics”. His website lists his research interests as “numerical methods for the solution of ordinary differential equations”.
That’s all that I can see, which doesn’t compare well with the nine particularly mathematical New Years Honours this year. Does anyone have any to add?
UK Government Birthday Honours lists 2013.
A sympathetic story for you this Saturday.
Andy has a problem. He can’t solve it on his own – he needs your help. This problem vexed Andy so much that he spent four years trying to solve it on his own, to no avail. It really is a very difficult problem. Finally in 1997, out of what must have been sheer desperation, Andy reached out to his fellow man: maybe some kindly type out there could find a solution to his problem, which he would gladly reward with a small consideration.
Can you help a soul in need?
Update 17/06/2013: The gap is down to 60,744. That’s a whole order of magnitude down from where it started!
When Yitang Zhang unexpectedly announced a proof that that there are infinitely many pairs of primes less than 70 million apart from each other – a step on the way to the twin primes conjecture – certain internet wags amused themselves and a minority of others with the question, “is it a bigger jump from infinity to 70 million, or from 70 million to 2?”.
Of course the answer is that it’s a really short distance from 70 million to 2, and here’s my evidence: the bound of 70 million has in just over three weeks been reduced to just a shade over 100,000.
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.
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.
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+