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).

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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.

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50th Known Mersenne Prime Found!

Persistence pays off. Jonathan Pace, a GIMPS volunteer for over 14 years, discovered the 50th known Mersenne prime, 2^77,232,917-1 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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..

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When Mathematicians Get Married

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.

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Math Champion Wins With Answer About Pecking Chicks

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?

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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.

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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.

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If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel

A tediously accurate map of the solar system.

Calca

I found this little gem of a tool called Calca. It is a text editor symbolic calculator.

Two-hundred-terabyte maths proof is largest ever

A computer cracks the Boolean Pythagorean triples problem — but is it really maths?

Three computer scientists have announced the largest-ever mathematics proof: a file that comes in at a whopping 200 terabytes, roughly equivalent to all the digitized text held by the US Library of Congress. The researchers have created a 68-gigabyte compressed version of their solution — which would allow anyone with about 30,000 hours of spare processor time to download, reconstruct and verify it — but a human could never hope to read through it.

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Fermat's Last Theorem Prize Approved

It was a problem that had baffled mathematicians for centuries -- until British professor Andrew Wiles set his mind to it.

"There are no whole number solutions to the equation xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ when n is greater than 2."

Otherwise known as "Fermat's Last Theorem," this equation was first posed by French mathematician Pierre de Fermat in 1637, and had stumped the world's brightest minds for more than 300 years.

In the 1990s, Oxford professor Andrew Wiles finally solved the problem, and this week was awarded the hugely prestigious 2016 Abel Prize -- including a $700,000 windfall.

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Mathematicians Discover Prime Conspiracy

Two mathematicians have uncovered a simple, previously unnoticed property of prime numbers — those numbers that are divisible only by 1 and themselves. Prime numbers, it seems, have decided preferences about the final digits of the primes that immediately follow them.

Among the first billion prime numbers, for instance, a prime ending in 9 is almost 65 percent more likely to be followed by a prime ending in 1 than another prime ending in 9.

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49th Known Mersenne Prime Found!

On January 7th, GIMPS celebrated its 20th anniversary with the discovery of the largest known prime number, 2^74,207,281-1. Curtis Cooper, one of many thousands of GIMPS volunteers, used one of his university's computers to make the find.

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With Discovery, 3 Scientists Chip Away At An Unsolvable Math Problem

There are now 15 known convex pentagons, or nonregular pentagons with the angles pointing outward, that can "tile the plane."

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