Occidental College Mathematics

https://www.quantamagazine.org/nasty-geometry-breaks-decades-old-tiling-conjecture-20221215/

‘Nasty’ Geometry Breaks Decades-Old Tiling Conjecture | Quanta Magazine Mathematicians predicted that if they imposed enough restrictions on how a shape might tile space, they could force a periodic pattern to emerge. But they were wrong.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-2-is-the-best-number-and-other-secrets-from-a-macarthur-winning-mathematician/

Why 2 Is the Best Number and Other Secrets from a MacArthur-Winning Mathematician Mathematician Melanie Matchett Wood seeks creative ways of solving open math problems

(Skip the first 3 paragraphs)

Sundial Puzzle I’ve quit explaining math on Twitter and moved my activities of that sort to Mathstodon. This is a branch of Mastodon, a federated social network that is run by its own users—not by an …

https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-mathematicians-study-knots-20221031/

Why Mathematicians Study Knots | Quanta Magazine Far from being an abstract mathematical curiosity, knot theory has driven many findings in math and beyond.

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/17/1129531931/choose-your-own-math-adventure

Choose Your Own (Math) Adventure : Short Wave Ever read those Choose Your Own Adventure books of the 80s and 90s? As a kid, Dr. Pamela Harris was hooked on them. Years later she realized how much those books have in common with her field: combinatorics, the branch of math concerned with counting. It, too, depends on thinking through endless, br...

New stamp out this week: Women Cryptologists of WWII.
Includes code words (with the cipher revealed on the back side of the sheet of stamps).
https://store.usps.com/store/product/buy-stamps/women-cryptologists-of-world-war-ii-stamps-S_482204

https://gizmodo.com/mathematical-intelligence-junaid-mubeen-excerpt-1849689127

How Breaking the Rules of Math Will Give Us an Edge Over AI A close look at how mathematics came to be shows the power of departing from convention, mathematician and author Junaid Mubeen writes in his new book.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-surprised-by-hidden-fibonacci-numbers-20221017/

Mathematicians Surprised By Hidden Fibonacci Numbers | Quanta Magazine Recent explorations of unique geometric worlds reveal perplexing patterns, including the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio.

5-minute video:

The High Schooler Who Solved a Prime Number Theorem In his senior year of high school, Daniel Larsen proved a key theorem about Carmichael numbers — strange entities that mimic the primes. “It would be a paper...

Google's AlphaTensor finds the fastest way to multiply two matrices and is expected to discover more new algorithms.

Discovering novel algorithms with AlphaTensor In our paper, published today in Nature, we introduce AlphaTensor, the first artificial intelligence (AI) system for discovering novel, efficient, and provably correct algorithms for fundamental tasks such as matrix multiplication. This sheds light on a 50-year-old open question in mathematics about...

https://www.quantamagazine.org/ancient-equations-offer-new-look-at-number-groups-20220810/

Ancient Equations Offer New Look at Number Groups | Quanta Magazine Ever since Archimedes, mathematicians have been fascinated by equations that involve a difference between squares. Now two mathematicians have proven how often these equations have solutions, concluding a decades-old quest.