Today is Euler’s $-306 \times e^{i \pi}$th birthday, and Google have chosen to celebrate (despite ignoring several other prominent mathematical birthdays, including Erdős’s centenary – see the @MathsHistory twitter feed for a full list) by creating a Google doodle on their homepage. For anyone who isn’t aware, this is when Google changes the image above…
Timothy Gowers’ mathematical writing experiment, which we reported on last month, has now concluded and the results are available. The experiment concerned a set of proofs of results on metric spaces; Gowers sought opinions on how well-written and understandable each one is. It turns out that experiment was a ruse!: Gowers revealed on his blog…
Here’s a round up of some other recent (and now less so) news stories we didn’t cover in full. 13 New 3-body orbits discovered Physicists from the University of Belgrade have discovered numerically 13 new solutions to the 3-body problem, in 2 dimensions. Described as “quite a feat in mathematical physics”, the discovery makes progress…
The London Mathematical Society Popular Lectures for 2013 have been announced. Professor Ray Hill, University of Salford, will talk about ‘Mathematics in the Courtroom’, and Dr. Vicky Neale, University of Cambridge, will give a lecture on ‘Addictive Number Theory’.
We previously reported a Cambridge screening of the Travelling Salesman Movie, the “intellectual thriller about four of the world’s smartest mathematicians hired by the U.S. government to solve the most elusive problem in computer science history — P vs. NP”. Now the movie is being screened in London, by the City University London Student Union…
The Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics, the Eötvös Loránd University and the János Bolyai Mathematical Society have announced a conference dedicated to the 100th anniversary of Paul Erdős from 1st-5th July 2013 in Budapest, Hungary.
Brandon Wilson is drawing a logo for a number each day this year. He started at 0 on the first of January, and he’ll finish with 365 on the first of January 2014 (or with 364 on the 31st of December. Not sure.) Sadly that means 367 – the largest number whose square’s digits form…