For a while, the Science Museum has been forming groups and making noises and tickling rich people with the aim of working out how they’re going to update their rather neglected maths hall. Yesterday they made an unexpectedly positive announcement: they’ve been given £5 million by rich people David and Claudia Harding, and Dame Zaha Hadid has drawn up a swooshy new design.
You're reading: Main
GeoGebra in 3D: ThreeoGebra!
GeoGebra, the Aperiodical’s official Favourite Thing for Messing About With Geometry, has just bumped up to version 5. With that bigger number comes another dimension – GeoGebra now supports three-dimensional geometry!
The Flyspeck project is complete: we know how to stack balls!
A team led by Thomas Hales has announced a formal proof of the Kepler conjecture – one of the oldest problems in geometry – which states that no packing of equally sized spheres in 3-dimensional space is more efficient than the face-centred cubic packing (pictured right), or hexagonal close packing.
Small gaps between large gaps between primes results
The big news last year was the quest to find a lower bound for the gap between pairs of large primes, started by Yitang Zhang and carried on chiefly by Terry Tao and the fresh-faced James Maynard.
Now that progress on the twin prime conjecture has slowed down, they’ve both turned their attentions toward the opposite question: what’s the biggest gap between subsequent small primes?
We’re Stuck! Help develop mathematical theatre
Just when you thought you’d seen enough mathematical theatre projects, here’s another one. We’re Stuck! is an Arts Council funded piece of interactive theatre aimed at children aged 7-12 and their families. The project will explore the idea that getting stuck is part of doing maths, and not something to be feared. The aim is to promote the idea of persisting with maths, even when it’s difficult – and they’re looking for your help!
2014 Fields Medals awarded – coverage round-up
At this week’s International Congress of Mathematics, in Seoul, Korea, the winners of the 2014 Fields Medal were announced. The medals, which were established in 1936, and are awarded every four years to four different mathematicians, recognise achievement in mathematics research.
Maths at the British Science Festival 2014
Since the British Science Festival’s programme of events for the 2014 festival is now online, you can search through it to find all the mathematical/maths-related events which will be taking place this September in Birmingham. But this is a full-service maths blog, and so you don’t have to because we’ve done it for you. (If you’d rather take a look yourself, the full listing is on the BSA website).