In a classic example of the intersection between maths and news, there’s been a new Mersenne prime discovered! Mersenne primes are numbers of the form $2^p – 1$, where $p$ is a prime number. They’re highly valued as a source of large prime numbers, since testing the primality of a (suspected) prime of this form…
The invariant subspace problem is still a problem
Recently we reported that Eva Gallarda and Carl Cowen had announced they had a proof of the invariant subspace conjecture for Hilbert spaces. Well, yesterday they announced at the blog Café Matemático that there was a problem with their proof:
Carnival of Mathematics 95
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of November, is now online at Maths Fact. The post is in Spanish, but can be translated into English using Google Translate. The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. For…
International Year of Statistics Video Contest
In case you’d already forgotten, 2013 is the International Year of Statistics (I had; turns out Katie told us about it just after the New Year). One of the many activities going on is a video contest sponsored by the publishers Wiley. Take it away, Wiley! We invite videos of four minutes in length or…
Rock Paper Squiggles
We’ve seen non-transitive dice, and we’ve had cellular automata coming out of our ears (and proceeding deterministically). Now, this: [youtube url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4cV0nCIZoc] A post by the CA’s creator describes in more detail what’s going on, although essentially the idea is that red, green and blue are able to destroy each other in a similar way to…
BSA STEM Poster Competition – Mission to Mars
Following on from the Maths Careers website’s ‘Mathematics of Planet Earth’ poster competition, I’m going on the assumptions that 1. everyone loves poster competitions, and 2. if they’re related somehow to a particular planet, that’s even better. The Manchester branch of the British Science Association is running a competition to design a poster around a…
Éditions Hermann donates its Bourbaki archives to the Bibliothèque nationale de France
A collection of material pertaining to Nicolas Bourbaki, author of the famous Elements of Mathematics, has been donated to the French national library by his publisher, éditions Hermann. Bourbaki set out to reframe modern maths in terms of set theory, to give the subject a coherence that would lead to more rigour and cross-application of results. The…