A conversation about mathematics inspired by an arbelos. Presented by Katie Steckles and Peter Rowlett, with special guest Catriona Agg.
Catriona mentions this proof without words, which is taken from Proof Without Words: The Area of an Arbelos by Roger B. Nelsen in Mathematics Magazine.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS | List of episodes
Top news this month: Pure mathematicians at Leicester have opened a GoFundMe to pay for legal support in their fight to keep their jobs. The London Mathematical society has published a letter making the case for pure maths at Leicester, and there’s a petition you can sign.
Hannah Fry has a new TV show about maths and sport, on BT Sport and YouTube, called It’s A Numbers Game (or IT’S A NUMB3R5 GAME, if you believe the logo). She’s joined by Pippa Monique, Ugo Monye, Andrew Mensah and Dr Nick Owen. It’s on each Saturday on both BT Sport and YouTube. There are some resources for kids aged 5 to 14 on Twinkl, to go with the show.
Dr. Marie Davidian is the recipient of the 2021 Marvin Zelen Leadership Award in Statistical Science. (via Harvard Biostatistics)
UK mathematicians Yuhka Machino and Jenni Voon earned gold medals at the 2021 European Girls’ Mathematical Olympiad, and the UK team as a whole finished third. (via the UK Mathematics Trust)
The Institute of Mathematics and its Applications is again running a series of online talks.
The first talk at the 6th May event will be from Nick Higham who has been awarded the Gold Medal award in recognition of outstanding contributions to mathematics and its applications. This will be followed by Jane Leeks and David Abrahams discussing future developments in mathematical sciences knowledge exchange.
There will be a couple more talks on the 25th of May to do with modelling and Covid-19.
More information: IMA Mathematics Online series
The London Mathematical Society is offering two summer placements – a Library and Special Collections Summer Placement (working with the LMS’s special collections) and an Equality and Diversity – Success Stories Placement (putting together profiles of successful mathematicians), both of which are paid hourly at three days a week for 8 weeks over the summer, and would suit prospective postgraduates with an undergraduate degree.
More information: Jobs at the LMS
The International Congress of Mathematicians is running a surprising maths videos contest. Prizes include a grant to attend ICM 2022 in St Petersburg, which won’t be much use to LGBT+ mathematicians, whose existence in Russia is illegal, or Azat Miftakhov, a student at Moscow State University who has been detained by Russian authorities for two years. If that doesn’t faze you, the ICM has produced an example of a surprising maths video:
Kelsey Houston-Edwards writes in Quanta magazine about a proof of the Erdős-Faber-Lovász conjecture on colouring hypergraphs. The preprint by Dong Yeap Kang, Tom Kelly, Daniela Kühn, Abhishek Methuku and Deryk Osthus is available on the arXiv.
Also in Quanta magazine (if you can pay people to write maths news, they write maths news! Who knew?), Erica Klarreich writes about a counterexample to the unit conjecture on group algebras, presented at the end of a talk by Giles Gardam, and Steve Nadis writes about a recent proof of a special case of the Erdős-Hajnal conjecture in graph theory. That guy Erdős sure made a lot of conjectures.
Over on the mersenneforum.org, where seekers of new and exciting prime numbers hang out, it’s been reported that a new probable prime repunit has been found – it’s got a record 5794777 decimal digits, all of which are the digit 1. (via Ed Pegg)
Version 3.0 of SnapPy, program for studying the topology and geometry of 3-manifolds, has been released. (via Jordan Ellenberg)
Early Family Math is a new free maths resource website for children from 6 months to 6 years old. At the moment it has a lot of resources for activities, and some maths story books. They say that videos are forthcoming.
And finally, there’s a fundraiser for Mathematicians of the African Diaspora, which hosts the largest searchable database of mathematical scientists of the African Diaspora in the world, and is looking for funding to expand its database and reach a wider audience so it can continue to inspire the next generation of Black mathematicians. (via Edray Goins)
Here’s a round-up of some maths news we didn’t yet write about this month.
This month the Abel Prize committee announced this year’s award will go to László Lovász and Avi Wigderson “for their foundational contributions to theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics, and their leading role in shaping them into central fields of modern mathematics.” The prize will be handed over at a ceremony in May. You can read more about this year’s prize on the Abel Prize website.
Cheryl Praeger has been awarded the inaugural Ruby Payne-Scott Medal for her mathematical work on symmetry and developing algorithms that help power technology around the world. Named after pioneering Australian radio astronomer Ruby Payne-Scott, the medal recognises exceptional researchers in physical and biological sciences and is awarded by the Australian Academy of Science.
The Royal Society of Edinburgh has announced its list of 2021 Fellows, which includes mathematicians Paul Glendinning, Tara Brendle and Bernd Schroers.
And since we haven’t reported enough Alan Turing news, the design for the new Alan Turing £50 note has been revealed. GCHQ have released a series of puzzles linked to the design (presumably looking to find the next Alan Turing, so they can put whoever it is on the £100 note a century from now).
Visit the Turing Challenge website to throw your hat in.
The IMA are running a What it’s like to study Mathematics at University?’ Conference online on 14th April – with speakers including researchers, maths teachers and A-level students, the event will explore what being a student mathematician entails and how to take it further into a career. For ages 16+, it’s free to attend and you can register online.
From the people who brought you the WayBack Machine, the Internet Archive Scholar includes over 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive. The collection includes everything from digitised copies of eighteenth century journals through to the latest Open Access conference proceedings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web.
The newly launched Her Maths Story website collects stories of women mathematicians from all over the world, and includes photos and pithy quotes – it’ll be a useful resource if you want to showcase real mathematicians and their varied backgrounds and careers.
Rob Eastaway has written a lovely blog post about statistician John Haigh, who passed away on 9th March. Rob also recommends John’s book Taking Chances: Winning with Probability.
Long before Catriona Agg’s Geometry Puzzles in Felt Tip Pen were all over Twitter, Ed Southall was doing something similar without felt tips. He and Vincent Pantaloni served up a smorgasbord of Geometry Snacks in 2017 and More Geometry Snacks the following year — but these are aimed at a (chronologically) grown-up market.
Geometry Juniors, as it says on the tin, is aimed at a younger audience. Or rather, it’s aimed at parents or carers of a younger audience; it’s as much for starting conversations about geometry as it is for direct instruction or to bamboozle puzzle-solvers.
Here’s a round-up of the latest mathematical news from the (perfectly rectangular) month of February.
Registration is now open for the upcoming virtual Women and Non-Binary People in Mathematics conference funded by the LMS, taking place on 11th-12th February. The event is open to all mathematicians in all stages of their career and from any field, and is on MS Teams.
The LMS are also running their annual Women in Mathematics Day on 24th March, aiming to promote interest and careers in mathematics for women. Open to mathematicians of all genders, backgrounds and career stages, the event will include talks from academia and industry, a panel discussion and a poster competition with prizes.
For 2021’s International Day of Mathematics on 14th March, the theme is Mathematics for a Better World. The organisers have now launched their 2021 website, Mathematics for a Better World, which shows some cool applications of maths.
IDM are also holding a poster challenge linked to the theme, Mathematics for a Better World. The challenge is to create a poster that shows one way to make the world a little bit better using mathematics. The competition runs until 1st March.
Eureka, the recreational mathematics journal produced by the Cambridge University Mathematical Society The Archimedeans, has placed all of its old archive issues online so anyone can access them.
If you remember physical printed media from the Past Times and are a fan, you can order physical printed copies of Chalkdust Issues 11 & 12 through their website.
Numberphile creator Brady Haran and maths pioneer Prof. Cheryl Praeger are among those awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia, as part of this year’s Australia Day celebrations on 25th Jan.
• WA’s first female maths professor lands top award in Australia Day honours list, at ABC News
• Brady’s writeup about the award on his blog
Communications of the American Mathematical Society (CAMS) is a new, diamond open access journal designed to provide a home for the very best research and review articles across all areas of mathematics. CAMS will be a natural home for both pure and applied mathematics, presenting a window into a holistic view of mathematics and its applications to a wide range of disciplines. The AMS expects the journal to be a diverse and inclusive home for mathematicians around the world in support of emerging research. It is anticipated that the first published articles will appear in early 2021. For more information, visit the journal’s webpage.
(via Ian Agol on Twitter)
Three of the UK’s leading research institutes will be supported to widen access to mathematical sciences and support training through funding confirmed on 21st January. The Isaac Newton Institute (INI), the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences (ICMS) and the Heilbronn Institute for Mathematical Research (HIMR) will be able to support a wide range of education and training activities using the money.
The funding is part of the £300 million government investment in the Additional Funding Programme for Mathematical Sciences, announced in 2020.
Funding boost for mathematical sciences institutes, on the UKRI website
January 2021 funding increase: what does it mean for INI, ICMS and the mathematical community? on YouTube
(via EPSRC on Twitter)
Aerospace engineer Krystina Pearson-Rampeearee has launched a new set of pin badges which proudly proclaim “This is what a mathematican looks like”. In the accompanying Twitter thread, she explains that £1.50 from the sale of each badge will go to maths positivity charity Maths on Toast.
The badges are available, along with a range of others, in Krystina’s Etsy shop for £6.99 + P&P.
(via @Obeverley on Twitter)
Some scientific publishers are reporting a surge in submissions this year as scholars find more time during the pandemic to write papers. Does mathematics fit this pattern? Err, no. This blog post by Edward Dunne for the AMS goes into it.
(via @AmerMathSoc on Twitter)
Graham Hoare has died aged 85. Among his many achievements he was a mathematician and teacher, one of the driving forces behind the Royal Institution’s mathematics masterclasses, letters editor for the Mathematics Today journal and an active member of the Mathematical Association.
Graham Hoare obituary, in the Guardian.
In a move which claims to ‘shape for excellence’, the University of Leicester plans to cease research in pure mathematics. All pure mathematicians will be made redundant (in the middle of a pandemic) and three teaching-focused lecturers will be hired to cover their undergraduate programmes.
The idea is that the university needs to focus more on its “future research identity in AI, computational modelling, digitalisation and data science”, and that resources will be reallocated there. Presumably they’ll have to also outsource any integers or algebraic structures they need in order to do those things as well.
Previous attempts to do a similar thing in 2016 were met with outcry, including from the late Sir Michael Atiyah, and dropped, but they’re trying again. There’s a petition protesting the decision which already has over 5,000 signatures.
Mathematics is not redundant, on iPetitions.
Redundancies comment #3 – Plan for Maths doesn’t add up, on the University of Leicester UCU website.
(via Tim Gowers on Twitter)
Today the European Mathematical Society launches PopMath, a calendar of popular maths events taking place across Europe and beyond, including online. It should be a great resource for people wanting to find or share details of mathematical outreach activities.
