I'm enjoying the recent series of guest articles on @tao's blog on the general topic of AI in maths: https://terrytao.wordpress.com

What's new

Updates on my research and expository papers, discussion of open problems, and other maths-related topics. By Terence Tao

terrytao.wordpress.com

Long-term followers may remember that I've been interested in this shape, which (rather to my surprise) can fill space.

* want a lot of 3mm magnets for a project; * they are out of stock, so I order 4mm magnets instead; * they arrive; * they’re actually 3mm. Never believe anyone who tells you two wrongs don’t make a right.

If you’re desperate for a crumb of #emf2026 magic in your everyday life, you can now 3d print your very own miniature model of the Maths Village Cuboctahedron! https://makerworld.com/en/models/3226685-model-of-the-2026-emf-maths-village-cuboctahedron

I assume everyone gets an overpowering urge to say HAIL ERIS when seeing one of these.

And here is a claimed complex structure on S^6: https://alpo.ge/s6.pdf This is a notorious problem that has attracted many claimed solutions that did not stand up to scrutiny, so some caution is warranted, but IMHO there are also grounds for optimism. (Context […]

This is interesting. What’s the smallest set in which a regular star with 3–6 arms can be rotated all the way round? It’s known that for a line segment, arbitrarily small sets are possible: this is the Kakeya needle problem. It was known that arbitrarily small sets were *not* possible for […]

Wild things are happening in the world of elliptic curves. On Thursday a curve of rank ≥ 30 was announced, surpassing the previous rank record of 29: https://elliptic-rank.icarm.cloud/curve/273 A few minutes ago, a curve of rank ≥ 31 dropped: https://elliptic-rank.icarm.cloud/curve/302 Are […]

In case I'm not the only person left who prefers to read a paper book rather than an electronic screen, you may be interested to know that the Bridges proceedings are obtainable in physical form.

“20 yr ago”

New opinion from Doron Zeilberger, that I'm sure will prove as uncontroversial as all his other opinions. https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Opinion197.html

The new length-5905 superpermutation fits very very easily into the 1729 characters of a Mathstodon post, in kernel/extensions format, viz […]

There have been a lot of new discoveries about superpermutations of late, but my absolute favourite is Andrei Teodorescu’s discovery of a length-5905 superpermutation on 7 symbols. This is one shorter than the best that was previously known – and honestly one shorter than I would have guessed […]

I just saw a German man in Reykjavik airport wearing a Look Mum No Computer shirt.

RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@GerardWestendorp/117084919499826588 The interactive soccer ball explorer is great fun. There are 1812 possibilities! https://lipn.univ-paris13.fr/~fernique/gallery/animball.html

Unpacking after Bridges is rather a surreal experience.

gist.github.com/matthen/18c2...

Genus-291 toroidal polyhedron by Squilliams - V=1770, E=6600, F=4250 (chi = -580)

Genus-291 toroidal polyhedron by Squilliams - V=1770, E=6600, F=4250 (chi = -580) - README.md

gist.github.com

Does anyone know where to find a 3d model or precise description of this new toroid? https://youtu.be/0aTUTxOiRgU

An interesting effect: photographing this projected screen with my phone camera causes a rainbow effect on the photograph, which isn't visible to the naked eye. Is this a common phenomenon? I don't remember seeing it before.

I'm heading to Galway today. Who else is going to Bridges?

“we are sharing a *selection* of ten results…” (emphasis mine). I wonder what else they're sitting on. https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/

As @pozorvlak mentioned earlier, after YEARS of stasis there has been an astonishing amount of progress since last week on the minimal superpermutation problem. The record has been broken for all n > 7, the lower bound has been massively improved; and there's even a proposed proof that 872 […]

Have you ever wondered how to construct precise square roots using the drawing tools in PowerPoint and Google Slides? Man is it your lucky day! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kL6aefA8wgo

It has been a *wild* week on the mailing list devoted to the minimum superpermutation problem. After seven years of no progress, we've seen - an improvement to the 4chan lower bound - a new lower bound based on a draft proof that had been in limbo for years - an improvement to the upper bound […]

RE: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csLO_bot/116911516892048971 It looks as though one of my favourite problems has been solved! It's related to both Petri nets and linear logic. BVAS are more general than VAS – which are more or less the same as Petri nets. The reachability problem for VAS was […]

Surely someone is missing something here: the woven artefact is clearly a cuboctahedron, and I don't think any wasps make cuboctahedral nests.

Very nice YouTube short summarising @Ayliean’s record-breaking 14-disk Towers of Hanoi solve at #emfcamp. https://youtube.com/shorts/3waVV7Fjct0A

[Q: What is never odd or even?] A: a palindrome

RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@gregeganSF/116950448993083825 Wow. Humans are really bad at maths, it turns out. We spent the last 80+ years thinking this conjecture was true, but there is a simple counterexample.