## Archive for April, 2015

### Speakers at the 7th European Congress of Mathematics announced

April 29, 2015

The next ECM will take place in Berlin in july 2016.   The plenary and invited speakers have been announced in the past two days, here are the lists, to which I’ve added links to homepages (URLs valid as of today) :

Plenary speakers

Invited speakers

Abel lecture : Yakov G. Sinai
Friedrich Hirzebruch Lecture : Don Zagier
Public lecture : Helmut Pottmann
Next Generation Outreach Lecture : Peter Scholze (a lecture for high-schoolers, what a great idea!)

And to track the balance of genders, that’s 30% women for plenary speakers (3/10), and 21% for invited speakers (7/33).

### Some recent items

April 28, 2015

Yet another pot-pourri of links :

• École Normale Supérieure, with the support of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, has opened yesterday a position of Chair for a Full Professor in the fields of Analysis, Probability or Dynamical Systems
• János Pintz has just announced a proof of a long open conjecture of Erdős, Pólya and Turán, thus establishing for example that since $2-3=-1<0$ and $2-3+5=4>0$ then the sequence of prime sums $( 2(p_{n+1}-p_n)-3(p_{n+2}-p_{n+1})+5(p_{n+3}-p_{n+2}))_{n\in \mathbb{N}}$, that is $(5p_{n+3}-8p_{n+2}+5p_{n+1}-2p_n)_{n\in \mathbb{N}}$, will change signs infinitely often
• MO is still able to come up with highly interesting simple looking questions, which is good news
• closing date is may 15th for the summer school at Institut Fourier on Geometric measure Theory and Calculus of Variations, featuring in particular Fermat Prizewinner Camillo De Lellis and new Princeton Professor Fernando Codá Marques (besides, the view from the campus is quite nice)
• and, finally, readers who collect strange objets will have the opportunity on may 6th to bid for a handle of Gaspard Monge’s coffin (presumably obtained during his tranfer to the Panthéon in 1989)

### Anticipating the Ramanujan biopic

April 19, 2015

Earlier this month, the TFI SLOAN Filmmaker fund announced its grantees for 2015, and the Srinivasa Ramanujan biopic The Man Who Knew Infinity, now in post-production, is among them.

That’s definitely a movie that could be inspiring indeed, given that Ken Ono has been very much involved in the project and the cast is full of competent actors, as mentionned in Adriana Salerno’s earlier informative blog post.

So its release will probably be a good opportunity to set up public conferences on related topics, or at least get prepared for some questions.

The wikipedia article seems to have a fairly comprehensive compilation of references that could be useful in this regard, including :

April 14, 2015

A mix of recently spotted things:

• the program of the next Bourbaki seminar (at the end of june) looks very interesting indeed (in particular, I also noticed that Peter Keevash released a new preprint recently, while Sophie Morel is currently an Aisenstadt Chair in CRM)
• a new video of Alain Connes discussing the emergence of time in quantum mechanics, published today on the youtube channel of IHÉS
• the conference on Shinichi Mochizuki’s IUT theory, previously mentionned on this blog, will feature lots of people including Paul Vojta and Peter Sholze
• it is announced in the march newsletter of the EMS that the next 10 prizes for European mathematicians under 35 will be awarded for work accepted for publication before october 31, 2015
• the amount of french math students that compete each year to get an Agrégation de Mathématiques has again dropped in 2015, and has declined by a staggering 60% in the past 8 years tweeted the President of the Agrégation Jury (as a result, the past few years have seen hundreds of unfilled positions, and this year will be no different)
• a recent addition in Gallica : the 1630 translation in french of François Viète’s Algèbre Nouvelle by Vasset, with in particular an illustration of the Problem of Apollonius on the frontispice

### The Tombstone of Madame du Châtelet (1706-1749)

April 5, 2015

In 2006, to mark the tricentenary of the birth of first ever frenchwoman scientist, Émilie Du Châtelet, an exhibition was organized in Paris by Elizabeth Badinter (booklet here).

Then, a few years ago, several newly found mathematics and physics manuscripts written by la Marquise du Châtelet were sold at an important Christie’s sale.

What about the final resting place of such a fine woman? Well, it is a very sober black tombstone in Saint-Jacques church, in Lunéville. Elisabeth Badinter, and Annie Jourdain, tried to have something done so that it is not walked over by the faithfull, but there were no protective barriers when I visited a few days ago.

By the way, the Château de Lunéville, which sadly was ravaged by a fire in 2003, has been nicely restaured over a decade, and is well worth a visit. I went there early enough to catch a nice april cold fog.

### Fraud with a watch

April 4, 2015

In my former life, when I was a teacher (and like most teachers of course), I caught many times some high-schoolers cheating. Needless to say, those weren’t the brightest of the class, and were easy to spot even with smartphones involved.

On the other hand, one would expect students preparing Agrégation de Mathématiques, the most selective exam to become math teacher in France, to have at least some amount of morals. After all, they will become the very teachers meant to prevent their pupils frauding.

Counterexample: a few weeks ago one of the candidates has been caught cheating with a watch connected to the internet in which some pdf files had been stored…

The president of the jury banned that candidate, and issued a formal statement reminding the others that such frauds are legal offences, and that at the oral part of the exam next june the jury will be very vigilent towards fraud involving “stylos-caméra, montres Internet, téléphone, fibres spéciales, etc.“.

### Cédric Villani’s book tour (cont’d), and a remarkable student

April 2, 2015

After his UK tour, Cédric Villani will apparently later this month tour the US  (incidentally, it is mathematics awareness month there).

I’ve noticed events occuring in New York City (15th), Seattle (16th), San Francisco (20th), Minneapolis (22nd), Cambridge MA (24th), and perhaps at other places.

While searching for these I came accross a remarkable interview (published today) of Thomas Mordant, a very young and talented french student (4 years ahead of normal age), who happens to have Osteogenesis Imperfecta, has met Villani, and plans to become a mathematician.

Bon courage à lui pour les prochaines épreuves de Normale Sup!

Edit (21 july 2015): the results are out, and well done to him! Ulm at 16 is not so common, an Auroux-esque feat!

### That £2.3 million grant (and a new Mochizuki conference)

April 1, 2015

It has recently been unveiled that a team of mathematicians from Oxford, Nottingham, IMPU Japan and NYU have been awarded a massive £2.3m grant from EPSRC for their project ‘Symmetries and Correspondences’.

Three conferences, supported by the Clay Mathematics Institute, have already been announced, including one which will feature Langlands and Wiles (among many others), and one “on the theory of Shinichi Mochizuki” planned for december 2015 in Oxford.