“The author has succeeded to prove a landmark theorem in the distribution of prime numbers. … We are very happy to strongly recommend acceptance of the paper for publication in the Annals.” According to the Nature News blog, at yesterday’s seminar given by Yitang Zhang it was revealed that his proof that there are infinitely many…
The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences contains over 200,000 sequences. It contains classics, curios, thousands of derivatives entered purely for completeness’s sake, short sequences whose completion would be a huge mathematical achievement, and some entries which are just downright silly. For a lark, David and I have decided to review some of the Encyclopedia’s sequences.…
Update 14/05/2013: The seminar was successful: Zhang announced that his proof has already been refereed for the Annals, and everyone seems happy with it. Hard Maths news now: there’s a rumour going round that Yitang (Tom) Zhang of the University of New Hampshire reckons he can prove that there are infinitely many different pairs of primes at…
[vimeo url=https://vimeo.com/65475425]
Good maths books are simultaneously plentiful and rare. While there are a few classics almost everyone knows about and has copies of (Gardner, Hardy, etc.), the trade in lesser-known maths books is considerably less well-organised. Very few bookshops have well-stocked maths sections, and insipid pop maths books dominate. Unless you hear about a good maths…
Some grad students at Carnegie Mellon had a fun idea: what if each slide in a presentation was made by a different person, based only on the previous slide? Being grad students and thus having nothing better to be getting on with, they did just that, and nominated one of their number to deliver the…
You should take some time to read this very well-written piece about Shin Mochizuki’s claimed proof of the abc conjecture: “The Paradox of the Proof”, by Caroline Chen. It covers the story from all angles: a biog of Mochizuki, a clear, non-nonsense description of the conjecture, the tale of the mathematical community’s attempts to understand it,…