As a statistician, I had to put a little extra wrinkle in. How might I add an element of chance to the endeavor of writing a sestina? A Summer set.seed() Sestina Sara Stoudt Bucknell University Are you taking a break from mathematical thoughts and cozying up with a good beachRead More →
One of the fundamental forces in the universe is the weak force. The weak force is involved in holding atoms together or breaking them apart... Putting a period on mathematical physics Ursula Whitcher Mathematical Reviews (AMS) You've heard of periods at the ends of sentences and periods of sine waves.Read More →
Up until recently, all known aperiodic tilings used a minimum of two shapes, and it has long been a major problem to find a tiling that uses just one. Quite recently this problem has been solved, although only with a qualification… Hat Tricks Bill Casselman University of British Columbia “ButRead More →
There are other ways to compare rational numbers, especially if one happens to enjoy number theory... A Different Sense of Distance Maria Fox Oklahoma State University Dedicated to my Dad, Dr. Barry R. Fox. The idea of distance is central to so much of the mathematics we do and teachRead More →
If one has a pattern on a band, frieze, or strip (disregarding color if as often happens more than one color appears), regardless of the artistic content of what one sees, there are exactly 7 different patterns that are possible… Remembering Donald W. Crowe Maker of Connections between Symmetry, ArtRead More →
I would like to discuss the Jordan curve theorem as part of an intrinsic human activity: storytelling. The Jordan Curve Theorem as a Lusona Allechar Serrano López Harvard University Introduction The Jordan curve theorem is a result in topology that states that every Jordan curve (a plane simple closed curve)Read More →
Mathematically, the most intriguing of the new proposals use lattices for message encryption… What will they do when quantum computers start working? Bill Casselman University of British Columbia Commercial transactions on the internet are invariably passed through a process that hides them from unauthorized parties, using RSA public key encryptionRead More →
In 1915, the paper “Note on an Operation of the Third Grade” by Albert A. Bennett appeared in the Annals of Mathematics. A terse two-page note, it was largely neglected until the early 2000s… Hyperoperations, Distributivity, and the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Multiplication Anil Venkatesh Adelphi University Iterated Operations Everyone knowsRead More →
Social media platforms connect users into massive graphs, with accounts as vertices and friendships as edges... Predicting friendships and other fun machine learning tasks with graphs Noah Giansiracusa Bentley University Artificial intelligence (AI) breakthroughs make the news headlines with increasing frequency these days. At least for the time being, AIRead More →
What is the $E_8$ lattice that appears in Viazovska's proof? What makes it special? How do you use it to pack spheres? Eight-dimensional spheres and the exceptional $E_8$ Ursula Whitcher Mathematical Reviews (AMS) In Helsinki this summer, Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska was awarded a Fields Medal "for the proof thatRead More →