A conversation about mathematics and communicating mathematics inspired by a ‘Certified Mathematical Object’ sticker. Presented by Katie Steckles and Peter Rowlett, with special guest Chris Nho from Public-Math.org.
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A conversation about mathematics inspired by a taxicab. Presented by Katie Steckles and Peter Rowlett.
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Here’s some mathematical news from last month we didn’t otherwise report on here.
The European Mathematical Society has awarded the 2025 Fermat prize to Vesselin Dimitrov and Vlad Vicol, “for breakthroughs in number theory, Diophantine geometry, and the analysis of fluid mechanics and turbulence.”
A portrait of mathematician Hannah Fry (below) has been commissioned by the Royal Society from Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year Chloe Barnes. The commission is part of a year-long celebration of the 80th anniversary of the first women elected to Royal Society Fellowship, Kathleen Lonsdale FRS and Marjory Stephenson FRS. Visitors can view the portrait at the Royal Society’s public events, including the Summer Science Exhibition during the first week of July, and Open House London in September (or by appointment on weekdays, or by looking at the image below).
Hannah Fry was awarded the Royal Society’s David Attenborough Award and Lecture 2024 in recognition of her significant work in public engagement with science and for her prolific role in popularising mathematics.
New Game of Life discovery: a one-dimensional spaceship that’s 3,707,300,605 cells wide, that eventually recreates itself translated two cells to the right. (via Robin Houston on Mastodon).
There’s a new π calculation record – starting last July, computing industry reviewing publication StorageReview crunched a whopping 314 trillion digits, using a Dell PowerEdge R7725. The calculation took 110 days and finished in December. Still don’t know what the last digit is though, do they?
And in other slightly-larger number news, the number 751882!/751879# + 1 is the new largest known compositorial prime number, found by PrimeGrid. A compositorial number is one which is $n$ factorial (the product of all the numbers less than or equal to $n$, denoted $n!$) divided by $n$ primorial (the product of all the primes less than or equal to $n$, denoted $n\#$), so-called because it’s the product of all the composite numbers less than or equal to $n$. This number plus one, if prime, is then called a compositorial prime. At a truly whopping 3765621 decimal digits, this is now the largest known prime of this form. (via MOULE on mastodon)
A conversation about mathematics inspired by a Venn diagram. Presented by Katie Steckles and Peter Rowlett, with special guest Keisha Thompson.
Katie mentioned the MathForEquality badges and pins.
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The UK Government have announced the latest list of honours, and we’ve taken a look for the particularly mathematical entries. Here is the selection for this year – if you spot any more, let us know in the comments and we’ll add to the list.
A conversation about mathematics inspired by a slice of pizza. Presented by Katie Steckles and Peter Rowlett.
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We chatted to Chris Dawson – the creator of Jigsy, a shape-based puzzle app which we’ve enjoyed playing – to find out more about where it came from and how it was developed.