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The Sound of Proof

The Sound of Proof screenshot

Marcus du Sautoy has tweeted about a mathematics and music project he’s involved in, called The Sound of Proof. Five classical proofs from Euclid’s Elements have been interpreted by composer Jamie Perera into musical pieces, and they’ve put together an app/game to see if you can work out which one corresponds to which.

They’ll be announcing the results at an event as part of Manchester Science Festival in October. The project is a collaboration with PRiSM, the research arm of the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester.

The Sound of Proof, at RNCM PRiSM

Not mentioned on The Aperiodical this month, May 2016

Here are a few of the stories that we didn’t get round to covering in depth this month.

Turing’s Sunflowers Project – results

Manchester Science Festival’s mass-participation maths/gardening project, Turing’s Sunflowers, ran in 2012 and invited members of the public to grow their own sunflowers, and then photograph or bring in the seed heads so a group of mathematicians could study them. The aim was to determine whether Fibonacci numbers occur in the seed spirals – this has previously been observed, but no large-scale study like this has ever been undertaken. This carries on the work Alan Turing did before he died.

The results of the research are now published – a paper has been published in the Royal Society’s Open Science journal, and the findings indicate that while Fibonacci numbers do often occur, other types of numbers also crop up, including Lucas numbers and other similarly defined number sequences.

Messiaen’s “Quartet for the end of time”, animated by Simon Russell and Marcus du Sautoy

Marcus du Sautoy has teamed up with animator Simon Russell to create this animatino to accompany Messiaen’s Quartet for the end of time. It’s got all the usual arty maths things in it – the Fibonacci sequence and golden ratio, prime numbers, polygons and polyhedra of all sorts – as well as the less well-trodden sporadic group $M_{12}$. It all comes together quite nicely, though I much prefer the elegant end to the spiky-frenetic start.

There’s a page describing all the maths ideas to be found in the video at Sinfini Music.

via Marcus du Sautoy and Sinfini Music on Twitter

Riemann Hypothesis not proved, part 2

itsnotproved

Who could have guessed that this non-story about somebody being out of his depth and quite obviously wrong would get so out of hand? Here’s an update on The Continuing Tale Of The Man Whose Claims Couldn’t Be Verified.

Riemann Hypothesis not proved

itsnotproved

Here’s a tweet from Alex Bellos this morning:

He’s right to be surprised – as reported in Vanguard, a Nigerian newspaper:

The 156-year old Riemann Hypothesis, one of the most important problems in Mathematics, has been successfully resolved by Nigeria Scholar, Dr. Opeyemi Enoch.

Suspicion levels are raised, as the paper also reports:

Three of the [Clay Millenium Prize] problems had been solved and the prizes given to the winners. This makes it the fourth to be solved of all the seven problems.

Unless we missed something, that’s not massively true – the only Millennium Prize problem solved so far is the Poincaré conjecture.

Third Christopher Zeeman Medal to go to Marcus du Sautoy

The Christopher Zeeman Medal for the Promotion of Mathematics to the Public for 2014 has been awarded to Professor Marcus du Sautoy of the University of Oxford.

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