You may remember back in September we posted about a mass-participation science experiment, aiming to model the spread of diseases in human populations using a smartphone app. The results of this experiment, presented by the contagiously loveable Hannah Fry, will be presented in a documentary this evening on BBC4. You can also see Hannah chatting about the experiment on this evening’s The One Show.
Contagion! The BBC4 Pandemic, on the BBC watch-o-tron
The Abel Prize for 2018 has been awarded to Robert Langlands, for his work on representation theory and number theory. The Abel Prize website has a page with more information, including a lay explanation of Langlands’ work by Alex Bellos.
Robert P. Langlands wins the 2018 Abel Prize “for his visionary program connecting representation theory to number theory.” Congratulations! pic.twitter.com/HBiTJhChe0
— The Abel Prize (@abel_prize) March 20, 2018
Let’s recite the $13$ times table. Pay attention to the first digit of each number: \begin{array}{l} \color{blue}13, \\ \color{blue}26, \\ \color{blue}39, \\ \color{blue}52 \end{array} What happened to $\color{blue}4$‽ A while ago I was working through the $13$ times table for some boring reason, and I was in the kind of mood to find it really quite vexing…
The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences just keeps on growing: at the end of last month it added its 300,000th entry. Especially round entry numbers are set aside for particularly nice sequences to mark the passing of major milestones in the encyclopedia’s size; this time, we have four nice sequences starting at A300000. These were…
\[ n > 2 \]
An unexpected bit of controversy involving mathematical notation hit the internet last week, when China's government briefly blocked all Chinese internet users from viewing any page or message containing the letter n.
Apparently, those in charge of the Great Firewall feared that those who disapproved of Xi Jinping removing the two-term limit on his presidency of China would use the letter n to refer to the now-arbitrary number of terms for which he can remain in power.
There's some more context in a post by Victor Mair on Language Log, and in the Guardian.
The London Mathematical Society are organising an event later this month in honour of the late Fields Medalist Maryam Mirzakhani. It's at the University of Warwick on 22nd March, and will include talks outlining some of Mirzakhani's work, followed by a drinks reception and dinner. The event is part of a larger EPSRC symposium on Teichmüller dynamics.
This is nice for International Women's Day. Filmmaker Irina Linke and mathematician Eugénie Hunsicker have put together this montage of women in maths from all around the world.