I can’t believe I’m writing another “Mathematical topic: THE MUSICAL!” post so soon after the last one.
This time, the New Diorama Theatre is putting on The Universal Machine: a new musical about the life and death of Alan Turing. Here’s the blurb:
You're reading: Main
f(Erdős) = 100
Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Paul Erdős, or as most people would call it, Erdős’ 100th birthday. So, Happy Birthday Paul. And if you’ve never heard of him, let’s see what people at his birthday party are saying about the Man Who Loved Only Numbers. Please note: all birthday parties are strictly fictional.
Probably the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century, Paul Erdős … was so eccentric that he made Einstein look normal. He was 11 before he ever tied his shoes, 21 before he ever buttered toast, and died without ever boiling an egg. Erdős lived on the road, traveling from conference to conference, owning nothing but math notebooks and a suitcase or two. His life consisted of math, nothing else.
– Clifford Goldstein, in The Mules That Angels Ride (2005), p. 125
Gowers needs you for an experiment concerning mathematical writing
Do you know about metric spaces? Would you like to be the subject of an experiment? Then Timothy Gowers needs you!
Gowers put a post on his weblog this morning containing five propositions to do with metric spaces, along with three write-ups of proofs of each proposition. He’s looking for feedback on how easy or hard to understand each write-up is, as well as how well-written they were.
If you’ve some time to spare, go and take part in the experiment over at Gowers’s weblog.
Mary Ellen Rudin (1924-2013)
Mary Ellen Rudin, one of the pioneers of set-theoretical topology, passed away this week. She was 88.
The Royal Statistical Society 2013 honours
The Royal Statistical Society have announced their honours for 2013. RSSeNews has the list of recipients. The awards will be presented this September here at CP HQ, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
Sir John Kingman, the former chairman of the Statistics Commission, was awarded the Guy Medal in Gold. The Guy Medal in Silver went to Brian Ripley for, in addition to his theoretical work, his ‘pivotal role’ in the open-source R environment. There’s more detail and very short citations in the RSSeNews article. Since we don’t have a statistician on staff: can anyone add any detail about any of the recipients?
Read more: Royal Statistical Society’s 2013 honours announced at RSSeNews
The Abel Prize Laureate 2013: Pierre Deligne
The Abel Prize for 2013 has been awarded to Pierre Deligne, Professor Emeritus in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, for
seminal contributions to algebraic geometry and for their transformative impact on number theory, representation theory, and related fields.
ABC, as easy as pp1-40
Here’s something that slipped to the bottom of our news queue: Shin Mochizuki has uploaded a 40-page overview of his “Inter-universal Teichmüller theory” papers – the ones which he claims prove the abc conjecture.
Don’t expect to understand any of it, but maybe someone else will.
PDF: A Panoramic Overview of Inter-universal Teichmüller Theory by Shinichi Mochizuki
Previously: Proof News