Some december 2017 news

[Posted on december 4, 2017.]

In no particular order :

• the paper of Mohan Ganesaligam and Sir Timothy Gowers appeared earlier this year in the Journal of Automated Reasoning (ironically, a Springer journal in which it appears they had to pay an APC to have it ‘open access’). Looking at papers which cite it I’ve stumbled upon ALEXANDRIA, a EU-funded project lead by Lawrence C. Paulson. There is in particular a detailed description of actions which shows that, if I understand well, while it finds the human-legible aspect of the G&G paper interesting, it finds the use of formal libraries important, and will directly in result in stuff usable in Isabelle. Lawson’s PhD student Wenda Li has several interesting formal proofs papers, again in the context of Isabelle.  Another paper citing G&G is this one by Joseph Corneli et al., which also looks extremely interesting and from an entirely different angle! If only days had 48 hours…
• the Prizes season is in full swing. The 2018 Breakthrough Prizes have been announced : Christopher Hacon and James McKerman are the laureates for their work on the minimal model program (which previously earned them the Cole Prize in Algebra among others ; incidentally, this Cole Prize has just been won by Robert Guralnik this year). Also, 4 New Horizons in Mathematics Prizes went to Aaron Naber  (see e.g. this 3 part video on Yang-Mills Theory : part1 part2 part3), Maryna Viasovska (topically, Henry Cohn won the Conant Prize for his paper on the sphere packings story), Zhiwei Yun and Wei Zhang (both for their Annals of Mathematics paper in particular, see also Quanta Magazine).
• the Fermat Prize went to Simon Brendle and to Nader Masmoudi.
• Physicist Slava Rychkov (currently at ENS) has been named permanent professor at IHES
• Edward Frenkel announced two weeks ago that Shinichi Mochizuki had sent the final versions of his papers for approval. I think I saw it said that it had been submitted to a Japanese journal, but this is probably not Pub. RIMS since Mochizuki himself seems to serve as its editor-in-chief. Time will tell…
• Christie’s will look to sell next week for at least USD10,000 a 1952 copy of the issue of Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. which contains Turing’s paper on morphogenesis
• if you are a mathematics student in France, you should go to the Forum Emploi Math next week.

Peacock dance display, by Marco Verch on flickr