Or The Novice’s Guide To Achieving Mathematical Immortality
This is a guest post from Barney Maunder-Taylor.
A great way to achieve mathematical immortality is to solve an outstanding open question, like determining if \( \pi+e \) is rational or irrational, or finding a counterexample to the Goldbach Conjecture. But for most of us, a more realistic approach would be to contribute a new sequence to the Online Encyclopaedia of Integer Sequences, the OEIS. This is the tale of one mathematician’s quest to do just that – with ideas to help YOU to contribute a sequence of your own.
YouTuber and PhD physicist Derek Muller (Veritasium) has recently been involved in a physics-off with UCLA professor Alexander Kusenko, when they disagreed over the explanation behind a physical phenomenon, which escalated to a $10,000 bet over who was right. Long story short, Veritasium won the bet (as covered in this IFLScience news story) and will be using the money to fund a science communication contest. If you’ve got an under-a-minute maths/science video you can post on YouTube or TikTok, you could win a prize of up to $5,000. Props to Derek for encouraging more STEM communication and promoting new talent!
It’s been formally announced that Neil Sloane is stepping down as president of the OEIS – Russ Cox will take over presidential duties, while Sloane steps down to Chairman of the Board so he can dedicate more time to his writing projects (which we’re assured ‘naturally involve sequences’). Cox has been involved with the OEIS for over 25 years and has been a major contributor to the backend software that makes the site run, so he’s a safe pair of hands to take the project on.
The eleven 2021 LMS Prize winners were announced at the Society’s Meeting on 2nd July, and the prizes recognise contributions to mathematics in a variety of areas. (via @LondMathSoc)
Meanwhile, in Turing-adjacent news, the National Museum of Computing has launched an online Virtual Enigma machine you can use to simulate the device behind the famous Enigma code, along with a video explaining the machine. This joins a host of other virtual historical computers they’ve built, including the Colossus that cracked the code, the Lorenz machine and even ERNIE the random number generator!
If you want some actual Riemann Hypothesis news, here’s some: John Baez reports that Alain Connes and Caterina Consani have made some potential progress on part of the problem. In the words of Baez, “my interest is piqued”.
Interesting Links
Thuses is a website for mathematicians to publish and discuss ideas of interest to the mathematical community. It’s described as “a perfect place to share new approaches, slick proofs, and surprising counterexamples. A place for ‘folklore results’ that are considered known but don’t actually exist in literature. A place for everything in math that just has to be shared.” (via Piper H)
The BSHM (British Society for the History of Mathematics) has launched the Bibby Awards in the History of Mathematics, for “contributions to the popularization of the history of mathematics in education”. Named after (and funded by the legacy of) the late BSHM member Neil Bibby, up to four awards of £400 can be made each academic year, in return for which holders are expected to give two free talks in schools and produce four digital resources (videos, PDFs or interactives) for the BSHM website. (via Sarah Hart)
Events
Sir Michael Atiyah (image: INI)
The Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge is hosting The unity of mathematics: A conference in honour of Sir Michael Atiyah which will take place in September 2021 as a hybrid event with a mixture of in-person and virtual talks. The closing date for registration for physical participants is 8th August.
There’s just about still time to register for the People, Places, Practices History of Maths Conference (registration closes 9th July) taking place 12-15 July online (coordinated by the University of St. Andrews). With around 90 speakers contributing, the programme looks packed, and talks will be available to watch ahead, or at the specified time to be followed by a live Q&A.
Konstantin Kotov protesting in support of Azat Miftakhov in Moscow (CC BY-SA Natdemina)
Alexandre Borovik reports on his blog about Azat Miftakhov day, an event organised online by the Azat Miftakhov committee in solidarity with Azat Miftakhov – a graduate student from Moscow State University who was sentenced to six years in a medium-security penal colony and has already been arbitrarily detained by Russian state authorities for almost two and a half years. Fields medalist Cedric Villani made a speech at the event, and you can watch videos from the event on YouTube.
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. We’re rating sequences on four axes: Novelty, Aesthetics, Explicability and Completeness.
CP: It’s Neil Sloane’s 75th birthday today! As a special birthday gift to him, we’re going to review some integer sequences.
DC: His birthday is 10/10, that’s pretty cool.
CP: <some quick oeis> there’s a sequence with his birthdate in it! A214742 contains 10,10,39.
DC: We can’t review that. It’s terrible.
CP: I put it to you that you have just reviewed it.
DC: Shut up.
CP: Anyway, I’ve got some birthday sequences to look at.
DC: About cake?
CP: No.
A050255
Diaconis-Mosteller approximation to the Birthday problem function.
Top chap (and newest Aperiodipal?) Neil Sloane, founder of the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, wrote in to direct our attention towards a “best new integer sequence” contest being run on the sequence-fans mailing list.
Any sequence submitted between the middle of December and the middle of January is eligible. The winners (of which there will be at least three) will each receive a signed copy of the original 1973 Handbook of Integer Sequences, as well as the highly coveted “nice” keyword on their encyclopedia entries.
If you’ve worked with or used any sequences of integers lately (and let’s face it, you have) you might have looked them up in the OEIS. I’ve used it twice today, and it’s still before 9.30am. As you may have gathered from our extensive banging on about it, we’re huge fans of the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.
If you have visited their site recently, you might have noticed an extra paragraph of red text near the top – yes, they’re doing a Wikipedia, and asking for their users (which is realistically everyone) to donate so they can keep going. It’s a hugely worthy cause, and here at the Aperiodical, we think it’s worth supporting. The OEIS is owned and maintained by The OEIS Foundation Inc., a nonprofit company.
Head over to the OEIS for lists of integers with various properties, and to find out more.
It’s a repeat booking for the Festival of the Spoken Nerd in number 4 (or 16 if you belong to Team All Squared) of our podcast. Standup mathematician Matt Parker joined us to talk about interesting coincidences.
Yesterday I hosted another recreational maths seminar on Google+. I had a lot of fun! We discussed the paper, Seven Staggering Sequences (PDF), by Neil Sloane. In the paper Sloane, the man behind the fantastic Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, described seven of the sequences he found most especially interesting.
The Hangout was just under an hour and a half long, and we managed to get through five of the seven sequences. Some of them are really hard to understand!
