Springer has published a new collection on the ontology of mathematics, edited by son and father Ernest and Philip Davis. According to the publisher’s website,
The seventeen thought-provoking and engaging essays in this collection present readers with a wide range of diverse perspectives on the ontology of mathematics. The essays address such questions as: What kind of things are mathematical objects? What kinds of assertions do mathematical statements make? How do people think and speak about mathematics? How does society use mathematics? How have our answers to these questions changed over the last two millennia, and how might they change
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In a certainly well-deserved recognition, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has awarded the 2016 Abel Prize to Andrew Wiles of the University of Oxford, who in 1995 published a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, that centuries-old, maddening conjecture that an + bn = cn has no nontrivial integer solutions except for n = 2.
Fermat’s Last Theorem was first conjectured in 1637 by Pierre de Fermat in 1637, in a cryptic annotated marginal note that Fermat wrote in his copy of Diophantus’ Arithmetica. For 358 years, the problem tantalized generations of mathematicians, who sought in vain for a
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In a startling new discovery, mathematicians Robert Lemke Oliver and Kannan Soundararajan of Stanford University have found a pattern in the trailing digits of prime numbers, long thought to be paragons of randomness. They first discovered their result by examining base-3 digits, but their result appears to hold for any number base.
In base ten digits, for example, all primes greater than 5 end in 1, 3, 7 or 9, since otherwise they would be divisible by 2 or 5. Under the common assumption that prime numbers resemble good pseudorandom number generators, a prime ending in 1, for instance, should
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Pi Day is here again
Once again Pi Day (March 14, or 3/14 in United States notation) is here, when both professional mathematicians and students in school celebrate this most famous of mathematical numbers. Last year was a particularly memorable Pi Day, since 3/14/15 gets two more digits correct, although some would argue that this year’s Pi Day is also memorable, since 3/14/16 is pi rounded to four digits after the decimal point (the actual value is 3.14159265358979323846…).
Numerous celebrations are scheduled for Pi Day 2016. San Francisco’s Exploratorium features several events, culminating with a “Pi Procession” at 1:59pm Pacific
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To celebrate Pi Day 2016, we have prepared a collection of key technical papers that have appeared in the past half century on topics related to Pi and its compution. The collection, entitled Pi the Next Generation: A Selection, is soon to be published by Springer, with ISBN 978-3-319-32377-0. Details are available at the Springer site.
Here is a synopsis of the book, as taken from the Springer site:
This book contains compendium of 25 papers published since the 1970s dealing with pi and associated topics of mathematics and computer science. The collection begins with a Foreword by Bruce Berndt.
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