Aperiodical News Roundup – Jan & Feb 2025

Here’s a round-up of a few news items from the last couple of months not otherwise covered on the site.

Ingrid Daubechies has been awarded the US National Medal of Science, “for her pioneering work on signal processing”.

Applications are now open for the PROMYS Europe summer maths residential course for pre-uni 16+ attendees and UG student counsellors. The aim of PROMYS Europe is “to provide an environment for mathematically ambitious young people that will arouse their curiosity and encourage a deep personal involvement with the creative and collaborative elements of mathematics and science”. Student applications close on 9th March.

Students at a previous PROMYS summer school looking at an Enigma machine with Simon Singh

In research news, the McKay conjecture, a result in group theory which allows you to use properties of the Sylow normaliser of a group to infer things about the whole group, has finally been proved, according to this Quanta article.

And finally, crystallographer Alan Mackay is reported to have died. “He predicted the existence of quasicrystals, which was later verified by Schechtman who won the 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry for this work.”