## Monday, September 24, 2018

One of the world's most renowned mathematicians showed how he solved the 160-year-old Riemann hypothesis at a lecture on Monday — and he will be awarded $1 million if his solution is confirmed. Sir Michael Atiyah, who has won the two biggest prizes in mathematics — the Fields Medal and Abel Prize — took the stage at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany on Monday to present his work. To solve the hypothesis you need to find a way to predict the occurrence of every prime number, even though primes have historically been regarded as randomly distributed. Aityah's solution will need to be checked by other mathematicians and then published before it is fully accepted and he can claim the prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute of Cambridge. Click here for more information. ### Every Positive Integer Is A Sum Of Three Palindromes For integer g ≥ 5, we prove that any positive integer can be written as a sum of three palindromes in base g. Click here for more information. ## Wednesday, August 01, 2018 ### "Nobel of Mathematics" Stolen Minutes After Awarded One of the winners of the award known as the Nobel Prize for mathematics had his gold medal stolen minutes after it was given to him. Caucher Birkar, a Kurdish refugee turned Cambridge University math professor, was among four winners of the prestigious Fields Medal on Wednesday in Rio de Janeiro. It was an embarrassing debut for crime-ridden Rio, the first Latin American city ever to host the Fields ceremony, which takes place every four years. Less than an hour had passed since Birkar, a 40-year-old specialist in algebraic geometry, had been handed his 14-karat gold medal when his briefcase went missing. Click here for more information. ## Friday, March 23, 2018 ### Creator of 'Grand Unified Theory of Mathematics' Wins Prestigious Math Prize A mathematician who developed what some consider the "grand unified theory of mathematics" has won one of the most prestigious prizes in mathematics. Robert Langlands, an emeritus professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, has won the Abel Prize, a prestigious mathematics prize that honors a lifetime of groundbreaking work, organizers of the prize announced yesterday (March 20). Click here for more information. ## Wednesday, February 14, 2018 ### The Science of Magic Angle Sculptures John V. Muntean was inspired to create the Magic Angle Sculptures through his work with magic angle sample spinning, a scientific technique that mechanically simulates a molecule tumbling through space. The effect is to rapidly interchange the three axes of the Cartesian coordinates (x, y, and z). A complex observable phenomenon in three-dimensional space (such as the nuclear magnetic moments of a static molecule) can be represented by 3 x 3 tensors or sets of nine numbers; spinning at the magic angle simplifies that quantity to single isotropic values. Click here for his videos. ## Friday, January 05, 2018 ### 50th Known Mersenne Prime Found! Persistence pays off. Jonathan Pace, a GIMPS volunteer for over 14 years, discovered the 50th known Mersenne prime, 277,232,917-1 on December 26, 2017. The prime number is calculated by multiplying together 77,232,917 twos, and then subtracting one. It weighs in at 23,249,425 digits, becoming the largest prime number known to mankind. It bests the previous record prime, also discovered by GIMPS, by 910,807 digits. Click here for more information. ## Wednesday, December 06, 2017 ### Mathematicians Awarded$3 Million for Cracking Century-Old Problem

Christopher Hacon, a mathematician at the University of Utah, and James McKernan, a physicist at the University of California at San Diego, won this year's Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics for proving a long-standing conjecture about how many types of solutions a polynomial equation can have. Polynomial equations are mainstays of high-school algebra — expressions like x^2+5x+6 = 1 — in which variables are raised to the whole number exponents and added, subtracted and multiplied. The mathematicians showed that even very complicated polynomials have just a finite number of solutions.

## Thursday, August 24, 2017

### Mathematical Secrets of Ancient Tablet Unlocked After Nearly a Century of Study

Dating from 1,000 years before Pythagoras’s theorem, the Babylonian clay tablet is a trigonometric table more accurate than any today, say researchers.

At least 1,000 years before the Greek mathematician Pythagoras looked at a right angled triangle and worked out that the square of the longest side is always equal to the sum of the squares of the other two, an unknown Babylonian genius took a clay tablet and a reed pen and marked out not just the same theorem, but a series of trigonometry tables which scientists claim are more accurate than any available today.

The 3,700-year-old broken clay tablet survives in the collections of Columbia University, and scientists now believe they have cracked its secrets.