We now know 50 Mersenne primes! The latest indivisible mammoth, $2^{77,232,917}-1$, was discovered by Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search user Jonathan Pace on the 26th of December 2017. As well as being the biggest Mersenne prime ever known, it’s also the biggest prime of any sort discovered to date. GIMPS works by distributing the job…
On the 15th of May 1951 the BBC broadcast a short lecture by the mathematician Alan Turing under the title Can Computers Think? This was a part of a series of lectures on the emerging science of computing which featured other pioneers of the time, including Douglas Hartree, Max Newman, Freddie Williams and Maurice Wilkes.…
When the UK Government announces a new list of honours, we (let’s be honest – sometimes) write up a list of those particularly mathematical entries. Here is the selection for the 2018 New Years Honours list. Howard Groves, Member, Senior Mathematical Challenge Problems Group and Member, UK Mathematics Trust Challenges Sub Trust. MBE, for services to…
Exams have a nasty habit of sucking the joy out of a subject. My interest in proper literature was dulled by A-Level English, and I celebrated my way out of several GCSE papers – in subjects I’d picked because I enjoyed them – saying “I’ll never have to do that again.” Geometry is a topic…
Every year, Donald Knuth gives a Christmas lecture at Stanford. This year, he wanted to talk about a conjecture he’s recently investigated. It’s just over an hour long. Sit down with a warm drink and enjoy some interesting recreational maths from the master.
As part of this year’s MathsJam gathering, as for the last few years, we held a competition competition (you may have seen Peter’s recent post about his entry to the same event in 2014). My competition was the winner, and I thought I’d share with you some of the entries, as I very much enjoyed…
In Part I of this series of posts, I introduced the sporadic groups, finite groups of symmetries which aren’t the symmetries of any obvious categories of shapes. The sporadic groups in turn are classified into the Happy Family, headed by the Monster group, and the Pariahs. In Part II, I discussed Monstrous Moonshine, the connection…