Aperiodical News Roundup – February 2023

Here’s a round-up of the news stories not covered on the site over the past month.

Prizes and Appointments

Baroness Ingrid Daubechies is the first woman to be awarded the Wolf Prize in Mathematics. Awarded annually to outstanding scientists and artists from around the world since 1978, the award consists of a certificate and a monetary award of $100,000. (via Nalini Joshi)

Maths communicator and TikToker Ayliean MacDonald has been appointed the first Community Mathematician at MathsCity Leeds. Ayliean will run a series of workshops and events at MathsCity, and wants to make maths a multi-sensory experience – sessions will include maths art activities, craft workshops, and maths-inspired food tasting!

The New Government chief scientific adviser Professor Dame Angela McLean is a mathematical biologist. Her PhD thesis was on ‘Mathematical models of the epidemiology of measles in developing countries’ and she has been active in creating models of COVID as a high-profile member of SAGE and SPI-M-O.

Other News

The OEIS foundation is looking to raise $3m to fund a full-time managing editor. Founded by Neil Sloane in 1964, the site has so far been run by volunteers, but now a committee of board members has been set up to help raise the necessary funds for an endowment. They have also released the entire source data of the encyclopedia on GitHub, under a Creative Commons Attribute Share-Alike licence. Previously, the data was available in a less-convenient form and only under a licence forbidding commercial use.

Humans can beat AI at Go again! As this article in the FT reports, Amateur Kellin Pelrine has found and exploited weakness in strategy systems that have otherwise dominated strategies used by the game’s grandmasters. (via @moreisdifferent)

The Office for Statistics Regulation has written to HM Treasury to tell it off for tweeting a graph with a non-zero vertical axis. The graph, which showed inflation statistics for January, started from 8% and “gives a misleading impression of the scale of the deceleration in inflation”.

And finally: well-loved mathematician and metagrobologist David Singmaster has died. He passed away earlier this month, and Lucas Garron has been collecting people’s memories of David Singmaster.