## Thursday, August 17, 2017

### The Formula That Plots (Almost) Everything

Hold onto your logic hats! In this article we're going to explore one of the most amazing formulas in maths: Tupper's self-referential formula.

The protagonist of our story is the following inequality:

1/2<\floor{mod(\floor{\frac{y}{17}}2^(-17\floor{x}-mod(\floor{y},17)),2))

The plot works by either coloring a square or not coloring it: a square with coordinates (x, y) is colored if the inequality is true for x and y. If not the square is left blank.

If you plot the plot for many values of and , the outcome is the following:

I'll let that sink in a moment. No, your eyes are not deceiving you, the formula plots a bitmap picture of itself! Hence the name Tupper's self-referential formula (though Tupper never called this function that himself in his 2001 paper).

There is one missing detail, however. I haven’t told you the value of the number N on the y-axis.

## Sunday, July 16, 2017

### Math 'Genius' Maryam Mirzakhani Dies At Age 40

Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian-born mathematician who was the first woman to win the coveted Fields Medal, died Saturday in a US hospital after a battle with cancer. She was 40.

## Friday, June 30, 2017

### Mathematicians Deliver Formal Proof Of Kepler Conjecture

A team led by mathematician Thomas Hales has delivered a formal proof of the Kepler Conjecture, which is the definitive resolution of a problem that had gone unsolved for more than 300 years. The paper is now available online through Forum of Mathematics, Pi, an open access journal published by Cambridge University Press. This paper not only settles a centuries-old mathematical problem, but is also a major advance in computer verification of complex mathematical proofs.

The Kepler Conjecture was a famous problem in discrete geometry, which asked for the most efficient way to cram spheres into a given space. The answer, while not difficult to guess (it's exactly how oranges are stacked in a supermarket), had been remarkably difficult to prove. Hales and Ferguson originally announced a proof in 1998, but the solution was so long and complicated that a team of a dozen referees spent years working on checking it before giving up..

## Monday, May 22, 2017

### Eccentric French maths genius's 'scribblings' go online

Nearly 18,000 pages of notes by eccentric French maths genius Alexandre Grothendieck were posted online Wednesday by his alma mater, Montpellier University in southern France.

Grothendieck, who died aged 86 in 2014, "revolutionised an entire area of mathematics, algebraic geometry," said Jean-Michel Marin, head of an institute that bears the mathematician's name at the university.

A 13-year-old boy from Texas won a national math competition on Monday with an answer rooted in probabilities — and a dash of farming.

The boy, Luke Robitaille, took less than a second to buzz in at the Raytheon Mathcounts National Competition with the correct answer.

The question: In a barn, 100 chicks sit peacefully in a circle. Suddenly, each chick randomly pecks the chick immediately to its left or right. What is the expected number of unpecked chicks?

## Sunday, March 26, 2017

### New Twist on Sofa Problem that Stumped Mathematicians and Furniture Movers

The Moving Sofa problem asks, what is the largest shape that can move around a right-angled turn? UC Davis mathematician Dan Romik has extended this problem to a hallway with two turns, and shows that a 'bikini top' shaped sofa is the largest so far found that can move down such a hallway.

### French Mathematician Yves Meyer Wins Top Prize for 'Wavelet Theory'

A French mathematician known for his pioneering work on a theory used for applications ranging from image compression to the detection of gravitational waves from the merging of black holes has earned one of the world's top prizes in mathematics.

Yves Meyer, a professor emeritus in mathematics at the École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay in France, will receive the Abel Prize, the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters (which awards the prize) announced today (March 21) in Oslo. The prize, which comes with a cash award of 6 million Norwegian krone (\$710,000), will be bestowed by King Harald V of Norway on May 23.

Meyer was honored largely "for his pivotal role in the development of the mathematical theory of wavelets," the academy said. His work on wavelets began in the mid-1980s.