I am very happy to let you know that the first Women in Mathematics Day 🎊will be celebrated this year, on 12 May 2019; Maryam Mirzakhani’s birthday. Keep an eye 👁 on to get updates.
Fascinating that problems in one area appear in another seemingly totally different area. Sphere packing in Euclidean space is essentially the same as finding error correcting codes Maryna Viazovska
#fieldsmedal
One of the things I find troublesome in mathematics is the common view that difficult mathematics should stay difficult, that if you seek to make it accessible then you are trivializing the result(s)…
#mathematicallife
I periodically show this graph to promotion committees. Divide the average citations of papers in life science by a denominator > 6 to get something comparable to citations in mathematics. (From IMU/ICIAM/IMS “Citation Statistics” p.8)
The 2021 Abel prize winner Avi Widgerson’s book “Mathematics and Computation: a theory revolutionizing technology and science” is freely available (for personal use) here 👉🏼 (via
@GilKalai
)
My next door neighbor asked me (by text) whether we needed puzzles to keep us occupied during our isolation period
#COVID19au
Umm how should I explain that I have enough puzzles in my brain to keep me occupied for the rest of my life ?
“Mathematicians are notoriously bad historians; they describe the development of an idea as it should logically have unfolded rather than as it actually did …” So starts Peter Lax’s review “The flowering of applied mathematics in America” SIAM Review 31(4) 533-541, Dec 1989.
I’m still chuckling over these collective nouns from
@RobJLow
:
“A bundle of geometers
A tangle of knot theorists
An enumeration of combinatorialists
A network of graph theorists
An argument of logicians
A convergence of analysts
A sample of probabilists”
There is a wonderful set of 3 lectures by John Milnor on Differential Topology, recorded in 1965, which have an ethereal sense of the timeless truths of the universe being revealed step by step. Have you seen them yet? 👉🏼
I have long thought of the Gamma function Γ(z) as a mathematical beauty, not only because of the utter simplicity of the equation it satisfies: Γ(z+1)= z Γ(z), but also because it is a transcendental function, known not to satisfy any (algebraic) differential equation.
A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer are all given identical rubber balls and told to find the volume. They are given anything they want to measure it, and have all the time they need. /1
I try hard to make my mathematics talks accessible, in full knowledge of the fact that much of mathematical society looks down at accessibility – apparently it means the results can’t be that difficult 🤷🏽♀️
If you’ve heard about the newly discovered aperiodic monotile, known as an “einstein”, you may be interested in reading this post by David Smith, who discovered the shapes
Oh dear. No, please don’t be misled by the headline in the tweet. This is not “what mathematics looks like”. It is only one cog in the vast magical, beautiful, patterned structures of mathematics ...
Let me shout out from the rooftops especially to all the women and girls out there that this is no way reflects reality, especially in mathematics...
#ridiculous
Need a cheat sheet for mathematics? 👉🏽 See this ginormous (330-page) “cheat sheet" [PDF] ⚠️ WARNING: you may fall down a rabbit hole and end up in wonderland trying to chase some of these identities ...
An amazing idea has been proposed by the Committee for Women in Mathematics in the Iranian Mathematical Society: that the birthday of Maryam Mirzakhani be recognized as International Women in Mathematics day. #(WM)^2
@ICM_2018
This is a thread to highlight black mathematicians. (I will miss many, because I work in Australia, and our organisations do not gather such stories. Please add more.) 👇🏾
#BlackLivesMatter
#BlackintheIvory
I rely so much on mathematical ideas and mathematical ways of defining things in real life, that talking to non-mathematical people becomes very tricky…
This is the same Lisa Sauermann who had the single highest & perfect score in the 2011 International Maths Olympiad, and is the first woman to achieve this …
Congrats to Prof. Lisa Sauermann, for her European Prize in Combinatorics at
#Eurocomb2021
for her "profound contribution to combinatorics."
#eurocomb2021
For all of my life, I’ve been told equity is coming, be quiet, be polite, just wait a little while longer. But instead of progress, what I’ve seen is inequity hiding and growing in the shadows. I’ll be at the
#March4Justice
today in Sydney. Will you ?
#March4Justiceau
Roger Penrose has been awarded the
#NobelPrize
in Physics “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.”
On this International
#WomensDay2020
I want to celebrate unsung women, who were not given the opportunity to finish school, but found ways to champion those who did, like my mother who somehow came to terms with a daughter who needed to do mathematics
#IWD2020
So I’m about to cry at the supermarket; it turns out everyone behind the deli counter, the fresh fish counter and the sushi maker saw me on
#OnePlusOne
with
@JHutcheon
on
@ABCTV
"Elegant is a word often used to commend a good mathematical proof. It is a .. kind of magic trick without sleight of hand, in which nothing has been hidden, each step building up another layer of a .. hat that turns out to contain, in the end, a rabbit.”
Theorem: All positive integers are interesting.
Proof:
Assume the contrary. Then there is a lowest non-interesting positive integer. But, hey, that's pretty interesting! A contradiction.
#mathjoke
Thank you everyone for all the messages, likes, retweets, and emails acknowledging the momentous news I had today. Your acknowledgment means a lot to me.
#AustMS2020
#SzekeresMedal
Great advice from Marion Walter: “First, adults should never tell children, ‘I was not good at math.’ And second, they should not tell children that they are wrong.”
Celebrating Marion Walter, and other female mathematicians
While many
#mathematicians
know of Marion Walter, she should be known outside her field for her own story & the lessons she brings to our understanding of mathematics
Read the full article:
#STEM
George Pólya said, "Johnny (von Neumann) was the only student I was ever afraid of. If in … a lecture I stated an unsolved problem, the chances were he'd come to me at the end of the lecture with the complete solution scribbled on a slip of paper."
🤦🏽♀️ Let me see… Terry Tao, Akshay Venkatesh, Maryam Mirzakhani, Artur Avila, Ngô Bảo Châu, Shigefumi Mori, … This margin is too small to list all the great names without whom we wouldn’t even have mathematics …
“The first woman to teach applied mathematics at a German university” ☞ Hilda Geiringer who moved to the US after WWII on a visa granted for an unpaid position at Bryn Mawr…
Heisenberg and Schrödinger were in a car speeding down the freeway. They are stopped by a traffic policeman, who says
"Do you know how fast you were going?"
"No, but I know exactly where I was," replied Heisenberg
#mathjoke
/1
Since
#mathematical
#literacy
seems to be on the decline (at least in Australia), I wonder how many readers of the
#Economist
understand the mathematical symbol on this front page
The calculations I’ve been doing over the holidays have reminded me that getting to an insight in maths requires you to make mistakes, lots and lots of them... /1
Today, I finally arrived at a point where I will need to cite Ramanujan [img from G. E. Andrews and B. C. Berndt, Ramanujan’s Lost Notebook. Part I, Springer 2005]
The Executive Committee of the International Mathematical Union (IMU) has decided that:
1. The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) 2022 will take place as a fully virtual event, hosted outside Russia but following the original time schedule planned for St Petersburg.
“The more a field attributes success to giftedness rather than effort, the fewer female and black academics are in that field” 👉🏽 De-colonising mathematics (via Liz Mansfield)
“She is best known for conducting the Wu experiment, which proved that parity is not conserved. This discovery resulted in her colleagues Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang winning the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics” 🤦🏽♀️
Born
#Today
in 1912, Chien-Shiung Wu was a particle and experimental physicist who made significant contributions in nuclear and particle physics. She worked on the Manhattan project and conducted the experiment that proved that parity is not conserved
I am very humbled and pleasantly surprised to report that the Real Sociedad Matemática Española (RSME)
@RealSocMatEsp
has appointed yours truly as an honorary member…
I have heard some terrible news for mathematics and statistics at Macquarie University: 5 mathematicians and 4 statisticians (at levels B/C) are being let go.
#TakeCare
Have you ever looked at graphs of curves defined by polynomials (of 2 variables) with an eye to where they might get whacky? Newton did 👇🏽 (📸 Korchagin, 2013)
"Do you love your math more than me?"
"Of course not, darling - I love you much more."
"Then prove it!"
"OK... Let R be the set of all lovable objects..."
#mathjoke