Mirzakhani, Lindenstrauss, Witten, McMullen, Zelmanov sign petition against Trump’s immigration EO

[Posted on january 28, 2017.]

Fields Medalists Maryam Mirzakhani, Elon Lindenstrauss, Curtis T. McMullen, Edward Witten and Efim Zelmanov are, with several other prominent US-based mathematicians, among the earliest signatories of the Academics Against Immigration Executive Order petition, and well done to them ! [Edit: Terence Tao and Vladimir Voevodsky also signed.][Further edit: so have Pierre Deligne, Vladimir Drinfeld and Andrei Okounkov.] [Further edit: the members of the Board of Trustees of the AMS also signed and issued a statement.]

All Cedram journals are now Diamond Open Access

[Posted on january 17, 2017.]

As mentionned previously on this blog, starting this month all Cedram journals are now Diamond Open Access, so it adds Annales de la Faculté des Sciences de Toulouse,  Annales Mathématiques Blaise Pascal, and  Journal de Théorie des Nombres de Bordeaux to the others.  A fantastic piece of news, and I’ve updated my list of DOA Mathematics Journals to reflect this.

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In other news:

•  Olivia Caramello has put online her recent HDR Thesis as well as the (very laudatory) referee report
• Notices of the AMS has a nice piece by Henry Cohn on the sphere packing breakthrough
• talks by Emmanuel Lepage and by Wojtek Porowski on Shinichi Mochizuki’s IUT are taking place in Nottingham

Cliffs of Moher by khdc on flickr

(Alternative title: ‘compromise’ is not a swear word)

Further january 2017 items

[Posted on january 10, 2017.]

Another quick list:

• yesterday László Babai announced that he could find a short workaround to restore his quasi-polynomial claim (with modifications to his arXiv paper detailed shortly). If this checks out it is a remarkable story! In any event, Harald Helfgott’s Bourbaki seminar on saturday promises to be highly interesting (live on youtube [link updated to the start of the opera-themed talk] around 4pm Paris time, that’s 10am Eastern) update: paper here.
• the arXiv submission rates statistics are quite fascinating. I’d be very curious to know how this translates into number of individual authors.
• several interesting new features in mathscinet, if only it was open access…

Uccello Perspective Study by ArtGallery ErgsArt on flickr

Early january 2017 items

[Posted on january 4, 2017.]

Two very recent things:

• Danylo Radchenko and Maryna Viazovska have released an interesting preprint on Fourier interpolation on the real line, and while I do not understand it in any depth I’ve noticed that a formula at the end of section 7, namely that for odd Schwartz functions one has (where is the number of representations of as a sum of 3 squares) is exactly the little-known formula of Guinand that Yves Meyer rediscovered at the end of 2015 (see equation 9 in his now freely available PNAS paper) and which has already been mentionned on this blog and on MO (so I’ve told Radchenko and Viazovska about Meyer’s paper). That’s nice to see such a beautiful formula rediscovered twice and by different means! There must be deep and interesting connections between those two areas of math then…
• at the Bourbaki seminar next week Harald Helfgott will lecture on the much heralded work of László Babai on the Graph Isomorphism Problem, and Helfgott has just announced that he could check most of the proof but had found an error in the time analysis, partly corrected by Babai, who has just issued a notice about the issue.

Stern Clara und Hilli by Kerstin (aka Ella T.) on flickr