The 2018 Fields Medalists honored

Every four years the Fields Institute of Toronto, Canada announces its Fields Medal recipients. This year’s recipients are Caucher Birkar, Alessio Figali, Akshay Venkatesh and Peter Scholze.

The Fields Institute announces its awardees at the every-four-years International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) meeting, which this year is being held in Rio de Janeiro. The awards, which are made to a maximum of four exceptional mathematicians under the age of 40, are often considered the “Nobel Prize” of Mathematics.

Here is some information on this year’s awardees and their work:

Caucher Birkar. Birkar was born and raised in a very poor farming

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Amateur mathematician makes key advance in classic graph theory problem

Introduction

In a curious turn of events, British biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey, a well-known author and Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation, which is devoted to “reversing the negative effects of aging” and “significantly extending the human lifespan,” has made a significant advance in a 60-year-old graph theory problem.

Needless to say, in this day and age when almost all frontier-level mathematical research requires substantial training and, regrettably, specialization, it is not very often that an person without graduate-level formal training in mathematics, and whose professional life is focused almost entirely in a completely different field, makes a

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Noted mathematician and two computer scientists win prestigious awards

Introduction

The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has announced it coveted 2018 Abel Prize, which is named after 19th century mathematician Niels Henrik Abel. This year’s award is Robert P. Langlands of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA, for his “visionary program connecting representation theory to number theory.”

Separately, the Association for Computing Machinery announced today that its Turing Award will be given to John L. Hennessy (until recently the President of Stanford University) and David A. Patterson (University of California, Berkeley) for their work in designing “a systematic and quantitative approach to designing faster, lower power, and

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New Go-playing program teaches itself, beating previous program 100-0

A potentially momentous milestone has been reached in the decades-old battle between human intelligence and artificial intelligence.

Go playing board

Until 18 months ago ago, the ancient Chinese game of Go had firmly resisted attempts to apply computer technology — the best human players were substantially better than the best computer programs. This changed abruptly in March 2016, when a Google computer program named “AlphaGo” defeated the reigning world champion 4-1, a defeat that shocked many observers, who had not expected to see this for many years.

Now a new computer program, called “AlphaGo Zero,” which literally taught itself

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Talks on experimental mathematics

On 3 October 2017 I presented six talks at a seminar on experimental mathematics at the University of Newcastle, in Newcastle, NSW Australia.

Here are the titles and abstracts of these talks, plus URLs for the complete PDF viewgraph files:

1. What is experimental mathematics? (15 minutes)

This overview briefly summarizes what is meant by “experimental mathematics”, as pioneered in large part by the late Jonathan Borwein. We also explain why experimental mathematics offers a unique opportunity to involve a much broader community in the process of mathematical discovery and proof — high school students, undergraduate students, computer scientists,

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Bailey to speak Friday March 15 at Worcester Polytechnic Institute

If any of you are in the Boston area, Bailey will be giving the Levi Conant Prize lecture this Friday (Sep 15) at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The title of the talk is “Computation and analysis of arbitrary digits of Pi and other mathematical constants”. It summarizes some of the recent discoveries about Pi, including formulas that permit one to calculate digits of Pi (or Pi^2 or numerous other constants), beginning at an arbitrary starting point, without needing to compute any of the previous digits.

Here are the details of the talk, including the Abstract:

Conant Prize lecture

French mathematician completes proof of tessellation conjecture

We have all seen interesting patterns of tiling the plane with interlocking shapes, known as a tessellation. The process of producing a complete inventory of all possible tessellation has resisted solution for over a century, until now.

The honor goes to Michael Rao of the Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon in France. He has completed a computer-assisted proof to complete the inventory of pentagonal shapes, the last remaining holdout. He identified 371 scenarios for how corners of pentagons might fit together, and then checked, by means of an algorithm, each scenario. In the end, his computer program determined that the

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Jonathan Borwein Commemorative Conference

We are pleased to announce the Jonathan M. Borwein Commemorative Conference, which will be held 25-29 September 2017 in Newcastle, Australia.

The conference will focus on the five areas of Jonathan’s Borwein’s research:

Applied analysis, optimisation and convex functions. Chairs: Regina Burachik and Guolin Li. Education. Chairs: Judy-anne Osborn and Namoi Borwein. Experimental mathematics and visualization. Chair: David H. Bailey. Financial mathematics. Chair: Qiji (Jim) Zhu. Number theory, special functions and pi. Chair: Richard Brent.

A total of 36 speakers will give presentations.

The meeting will be held at Noah’s on the Beach in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, which

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Yves Meyer wins the Abel Prize for wavelet work

Yves Meyer, courtesy Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters

The Abel Prize

On 21 March 2017 the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters announced that the 2017 Abel Prize for mathematics, thought by many to be on a par with the Nobel Prize, has been awarded to Yves Meyer for his groundbreaking work on wavelets.

Many of the leading awards made in the field of mathematics are for highly abstract theoretical work. But wavelet theory is certainly in the area of applied mathematics, as it is now used in many different real-world arenas. Applications include data compression, acoustic noise

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Enhancing reproducibility in mathematical and scientific computing

Victoria Stodden, Marcia McNutt (President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science), David H. Bailey, Ewa Deelman, Yolanda Gil, Brooks Hanson, Michael Heroux, John Ioannidis and Michela Taufer have published an article in Science (the principal journal of the AAAS) entitled Enhancing reproducibility in computational methods.

In this article we argue that the field of mathematical and scientific computing lags behind other fields in establishing a culture and tools to ensure reproducibility. All too often, the authors of computations, even those that are published in peer-reviewed conferences and journals, have not fully documented their algorithms, code, input data

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