Occidental College Mathematics

02/09/2023

12/16/2022

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

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.

11/23/2022

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/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

11/06/2022

(Skip the first 3 paragraphs)

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 …

11/01/2022

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

Far from being an abstract mathematical curiosity, knot theory has driven many findings in math and beyond.

10/23/2022

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

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...

10/22/2022

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

10/22/2022

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

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.

10/18/2022

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

Recent explorations of unique geometric worlds reveal perplexing patterns, including the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio.

10/15/2022

5-minute video:

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...

10/07/2022

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

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...

08/10/2022

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

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.