Latest news with #mathematics
South China Morning Post
a day ago
- Science
- South China Morning Post
Renowned mathematician Zhu Yongchang joins Tsinghua after 30 years in Hong Kong
Prominent mathematician Zhu Yongchang will join Tsinghua University in Beijing after 30 years in Hong Kong as universities in mainland China continue their efforts to recruit top-tier talent Tsinghua's Yau Mathematical Sciences Centre announced on July 9 that Zhu, previously at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), would join the centre in September. Zhu's research focuses on the intersection of representation theory and mathematical physics. Representation theory builds on group theory – an important branch of modern mathematics, especially algebra, that provides a basic language for modern mathematics Zhu studied mathematics at Peking University, graduating in 1984. He was part of the second cohort of students to be awarded the Shiing-Shen Chern scholarship, established to support outstanding Chinese students in pursuing further studies in the US. The scholarship was set up by mathematician Shiing-Shen Chern in collaboration with the American Mathematical Society. In 1990, Zhu obtained a doctorate in mathematics from Yale University, where he studied under mentor Igor Frenkel. Zhu was a division research fellow at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) from 1990 to 1993, then held visiting positions at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University and the Max Planck Institute in Bonn.
Daily Mail
a day ago
- Science
- Daily Mail
How many colours in a rainbow? More than 100: Think Like A Mathematician by Junaid Mubeen
Think Like A Mathematician by Junaid Mubeen (Profile Books £18.99, 352pp) Doing jigsaws with Junaid Mubeen doesn't sound like much fun. Mubeen insists on sorting the pieces according to three characteristics: colour, number of tabs (pointy bits) and size. He uses three trays – one for each size – and creates grids on them, with each row representing a colour and each column a number. His brother-in-law, with whom he does jigsaws, prefers to just fish pieces out of a messy jumble. Mubeen is a mathematician. He believes that understanding mathematical concepts will help us think more clearly about everyday issues. And he's not just talking about 'applied' maths that helps us construct bridges or check our bank statements. He means 'pure' maths, which is more abstract and usually has no obvious utility. 'Pure mathematicians often take pride in the apparent uselessness of their work, even deriding the supposed need for their subject to bring practical benefits,' Mubeen writes. ''Here's to pure mathematics', starts one toast, 'may it never be of use to anyone.'' Across ten chapters he covers topics such as 'dimensionality', 'sets', 'axioms' and 'fractals'. He's good at leading readers through unfamiliar concepts and most of it is pretty interesting stuff. For example, everyone knows that the rainbow has seven colours, right? At school, we all learned 'Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet'. But that number is arbitrary. In his chapter on 'the continuum', Mubeen points out that: 'Those colours represent specific wavelengths (in increasing order) but we could just as well reference ten colours, or a hundred, or indeed any number between the two extremes of red and violet. Isaac Newton, whose experiments led to the discovery of the visible light spectrum, attached mystical significance to the number seven, which is probably why he settled on that many markers.' This leads into a discussion about numbers that can't be accurately expressed as fractions – irrational numbers, such as pi – and then to a description of 'calculus' and, for the first time, I, a non-mathematician, felt as though I understood what the latter is. But his efforts to show how this knowledge can map on to everyday issues are less successful. The jigsaw story comes in the chapter on 'dimensionality', in which he attempts to relate the mathematical concept of spaces with many more dimensions than three to the notion that there are lots of different types of intelligence. An understanding of multi-dimensional spaces doesn't add much to the idea that intelligence is a complex attribute. Elsewhere he writes that just as the limitations of our senses mean our perception of the world is a distortion of the reality, so the sort of mathematical concepts with which we are most familiar do not truly reflect the subject. Then he compares that with the way we provide only a selective view of our lives on social media. The analogy is reasonable but we don't need an understanding of complex mathematical ideas to get the measure of Instagram. I think I might be with those who celebrate pure mathematics for its lack of applications.
Russia Today
2 days ago
- Science
- Russia Today
Russian students secure six medals at world's top math contest
Russian high schoolers have won five gold medals and one silver at the 66th International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). The team, represented by six students from various Russian regions, ranked second after China in the unofficial standings, sharing the spot with the US. Held annually since 1959, the IMO is considered the most challenging math competition for high school students, requiring creativity and rigorous logical reasoning. Gold medals were awarded to Dmitry Grishko from Moscow, Ivan Chasovskikh from Khimki (a northwestern suburb of the capital), Ilya Zamotorin from Saint Petersburg, Vasily Patrushev from Vladivostok, and Artyom Sadykov from Chelyabinsk, each scoring between 35 and 42 points. A silver medal was awarded to Ivan Kokarev, also from Chelyabinsk. For the Russian national team, the competition was held remotely at a venue provided by Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko and Minister of Education Sergey Kravtsov congratulated the winners. Chernyshenko emphasized that the students had continued Russia's rich mathematical traditions, noting the country's legacy of producing many renowned figures in the field. Kravtsov added that the students' success highlights the high quality of Russia's education system and the strength of its mathematics. The officials also thanked the educators who contributed to the students' preparation. The Russian team was led by Kirill Sukhov, head of the resource center for supplementary education at the Presidential Physics and Mathematics Lyceum 239 in Saint Petersburg. The IMO is ranked among the seven most prestigious subject-specific competitions in the world, collectively known as the International Science Olympiads. This year's contest, hosted by Australia, attracted 641 participants from 112 countries. The Chinese team dominated the competition, winning all six gold medals and placing first in the overall team ranking.
BBC News
4 days ago
- Science
- BBC News
Lecturer retires after nearly 60 years at Sussex university
The University of Sussex has bid farewell to what it said could be one of the UK's longest-serving James Hirschfeld retired from the university after almost 60 years, during which time he taught some 15,000 undergraduates and published 80 research papers. The veteran mathematician joined the university aged to BBC Radio Sussex he asked why people were interested in his particular career. "It seems unimportant someone retiring," he said. 'Loved it all' Prof Hirschfeld, now 84, began working at the university in 1966, first as a junior academic and later serving as also met his late wife University of Sussex's vice-chancellor, Sasha Roseneil, said he had "contributed enormously both in his teaching... [and] as a world-leading researcher who has won prizes for his research in geometry."Prof Hirschfeld grew up in Sydney, Australia, with his Jewish parents having fled Germany in 1938 when he said "it was necessary to do so". Prof Hirschfeld said he had witnessed polytechnics becoming universities, shift from handwritten letters to computing, and the introduction of tuition fees across his nearly six-decade career. However, some things remained the same, like exams, he said. The University of Sussex has also grown over his time, with only about 2.500 students when he began, compared to about 18,000 now, Prof Hirschfeld said. Asked if he had a favourite moment, he said: "I have just loved it all."He added: "Working at the University of Sussex has kept me alive, and I will miss it."But it's finally time for me to bow out and let younger academics take over."
The Sun
7 days ago
- Business
- The Sun
We went head-to-head with AI and LOST as 30 of Earth's top brains left ‘frightened' after secret battle with chatbot
A SUPER-SMART artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot has spooked mathematicians who believe tech companies are on the verge of creating a robot "genius". 30 of the world's most renowned mathematicians congregated in Berkeley, California in mid-May for a secret maths battle against a machine. 3 The bot uses a large language models (LLM), called o4-mini, which was produced by ChatGPT creator OpenAI. And it proved itself to be smarter than some of the human geniuses graduating universities today, according to Ken Ono, a mathematician at the University of Virginia and a leader and judge at the meeting. It was able to answer some of the toughest math equations out there in mere minutes - problems that would have taken a human expert weeks or months to solve. OpenAI had asked Epoch AI, a nonprofit than benchmarks AI models, to come up with 300 math questions whose solutions had not yet been published. This meant the AI couldn't just trawl the internet for the answer; it had to solve it on its own. The group of mathematicians, hand-selected by Elliot Glazer, a recent math Ph.D. graduate hired by Epoch AI, were tasked with coming up with the hardest equations they could. Everyone who participated had to sign a nondisclosure agreement to ensure they only communicated through secure messenger app Signal. This would prevent the AI from potentially seeing their conversations and using it to train its robot brain. Only a small group of people in the world are capable of developing such questions, let alone answering them. Each problem the o4-mini couldn't solve would grant its creator a $7,500 reward. By April 2025, Glazer found that o4-mini could solve around 20 percent of the questions. Father of murdered girl turned into AI chatbot warns of dangers of new tech Then at the in-person, two-day meeting in May, participants finalised their last batch of challenge questions. The 30 attendees were split into groups of six, and competed against each other to devise problems that they could solve but would stump the AI reasoning bot. By the end of that Saturday night, the bot's mathematical prowess was proving too successful. "I came up with a problem which experts in my field would recognize as an open question in number theory — a good Ph.D.-level problem," said Ken Ono, a mathematician at the University of Virginia and a leader and judge at the meeting, reported by Live Science. Early that Sunday morning, Ono alerted the rest of the participants. "I was not prepared to be contending with an LLM like this," he said. "I've never seen that kind of reasoning before in models. That's what a scientist does. That's frightening." Over the two days, the bot was able to solve some of the world's trickiest math problems. "I have colleagues who literally said these models are approaching mathematical genius," added Ono. "I've been telling my colleagues that it's a grave mistake to say that generalised artificial intelligence will never come, [that] it's just a computer. "I don't want to add to the hysteria, but in some ways these large language models are already outperforming most of our best graduate students in the world." Just 10 questions stumped the bot, according to researchers. Yang Hui He, a mathematician at the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences and an early pioneer of using AI in maths, said: "This is what a very, very good graduate student would be doing - in fact, more." 3 3
