Here’s some mathematical news from last month that we didn’t otherwise report here.
Sad news
Dr Gladys West, one of the “Hidden Figures” behind developing the maths of GPS, has died. She was 95. (via A. Rivera). Metafilter has a comprehensive post about her work and influence here.
While it’s sad to lose nonagenarian heroes, it’s perhaps unavoidable. That seems less the case for another recent loss: the Mathematical Center of the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research was destroyed by the USA in its operation last week. (in Spanish; via matematiflo on mathstodon).
Accessibility news
Accessibility of mathematical materials is often an afterthought, if it’s a thought at all. I had to hurry back to put alt-text on the picture above. It’s good to see that several of maths’s learned societies (the AMS, EMS, LMS and SIAM) have published author guidelines for preparing accessible mathematics content.
AI happenings
There’s a fair amount of chat lately about whether the current set of AI tools can be useful to research mathematicians. In establishing whether AI tools can really help with new maths or whether they’re just regurgitating something they’ve seen elsewhere, it would be useful to have a set of problems whose answers are definitely known to humans, but haven’t appeared in any text corpus that the AI might have been trained on.
Eleven Serious Mathematicians have announced a project called “First proof” (1stproof.org), aiming to do just that. They’ve come up with ten mathematical questions and solved them, but rather than publishing the answers straight away, they’ve encrypted them for a week. So people have a week to try to get AI tools to come up with solutions, after which the human answers will be published and the AI solutions verified.
(via Terence Tao, who noticed the similarities with the old practice of publishing encrypted proofs to establish priority before properly writing them up)
Opportunity
Applications are open for PROMYS Europe 2026, a six-week residential summer programme at the University of Oxford, UK (July 12th to August 22nd). It’s open to pre-university students (age 16+) from across Europe (including “all countries adjacent to the Mediterranean”); the deadline is March 8th, but PROMYS recommend allowing plenty of time to tackle the problems that form part of the application.