We’d all like to wish a very happy birthday to the wonderful Richard K Guy, who turns 100 today. Happily, Guy remains not dead in either the corporeal or Erdős sense: he’s both fit as a fiddle (he climbed a tower for charity aged 97), and active in the mathematical community.
Collaborative prime number searching website PrimeGrid has announced its most recent discovery: on 14th September, user Tom Greer discovered a new pair of twin primes (primes which differ by 2), namely: \[2996863034895 \times 2^{1290000} \pm 1\] Found using PrimeGrid’s Sophie Germain Prime search, the new discoveries are 388,342 digits long, smashing the previous twin prime…
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of August, and compiled by Yen Duong, is now online at Baking and Math. The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. See our Carnival of Mathematics page for more information.
The University of Leicester says it’s facing a big budget deficit, so it’s got to make some cuts. In the current British climate, that’s nothing unusual. However, the university has decided to cut a lot more from the maths department than elsewhere. The way they’re going to do this is to sack almost everyone, then…
Puzzlebomb is a monthly puzzle compendium. Issue 57 of Puzzlebomb, for September 2016, can be found here: Puzzlebomb – Issue 57 – September 2016 (printer-friendly version) The solutions to Issue 57 can be found here: Puzzlebomb – Issue 57 – Solutions – September 2016 (printer-friendly version) Previous issues of Puzzlebomb, and their solutions, can be found here.
I remember when OCR of mathematics was such a difficult problem that there was no good solution. I remember hints some years ago that the then-current version of InftyReader could do a reasonable job of taking a PDF document and converting it into LaTeX code, but it was far from perfect. Today my phone told…
I’m at the MATRIX conference in Leeds, where I’ve just been talking to Adam Atkinson. He told me that he’s trying to compile a definitive list of countries that don’t use mixed fractions. This is going to be one of those wipe-your-bum-standing-up situations: it’s entirely possible that you can be on either side of this divide…