Ariel Procaccia and Jonathan Goldman of Carnegie Mellon University have taken it upon themselves to make fair division problems easier to solve with a flashy new website called Spliddit (eyy, fuhgeddaboudit).
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New Mersenne primes not discovered
The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, the premier distributed-computing prime finding initiative, has reported that $M_{32582657} = 2^{32,582,657}-1$, the 44th Mersenne prime to be discovered, is also the 44th Mersenne Prime in numerical order. It was found by Steven Boone and Curtis Cooper in 2006 (Cooper also discovered the current largest prime as reported here in February), but until now it was not known for certain that other, smaller primes had not been overlooked. GIMPS has now checked all the intervening Mersenne numbers for primality and having found nothing, $M_{32582657}$ is secure in its 44th-ness.
Further information
The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (announcement on the front page as of November 10)
Their page for the prime itself
Mersenne Prime at Wolfram Mathworld
via @mathupdate on Twitter
Logically Policed
This is a nice short documentary by student filmmaker Damiano Petrucci about mathematics and mathematicians, why they do maths and how they communicate it. It’s got a load of names you’ll recognise, including Oxford’s Ben Green and Aperiodipal Matt Parker.
via Colin Wright, who’s also in it!
K sera, sera: board of the Journal of K-Theory resigns (again) and starts a new journal (again)
The rumours are true: the editors which in 2007 resigned from the journal K-Theory have now resigned from the splinter journal they helped set up, Journal of K-Theory, to start a third journal, Annals of K-Theory. What a headache!
News Round-up, 21/10/14
Here’s some quick stories from the world of maths this week.
Petition absorbs way more signatures than this product with a stupid advert ever could
An Australian sanitary pad company has hit upon a witty tagline for their product:
Literally thousands of people have signed a petition to tell Libra that that’s not OK.
‘The Imitation Game’ Cryptography Competition
To celebrate the release of the upcoming Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game (see our incisive analysis of the film’s trailer by James Grime) the guys at the University of Manchester – who have previously run the hugely successful Alan Turing Cryptography competition – have been asked to run a one-off Imitation Game Cryptography Competition. And they have.
The competition is themed around the (possibly true? Who knows. It’s not like it’s my job to research these things) idea that Alan Turing’s fortune in silver is buried in a secret location somewhere near Bletchley Park, and it’s your job to crack the three coded clues and find out where. Prizes will be in the form of exclusive Imitation Game merchandise donated by the makers of the film, and the competition runs until the 28th of November.