Ramsey bounds and aperiodical tilings
eLife's experiment to change the publishing landscape; how equity can inform the teaching of mathematics
A new format for the newsletter:
A collection of recent developments in maths research, meta discussions on academia and education. Mostly brought to you by my Twitter feed. Together with a bit shameless self-promotion for the 🇮🇹 crowd.
The periodicity will remain somehow… unpredictable.
🗞️ Recently in math
[⚠️ Preprint] New bounds for Ramsey numbers; presented in many talks, one of which was, according to Tim Gowers, “reminiscent of the time I had been tipped off that Andrew Wiles's seminar at the Newton Institute on Wednesday 23rd June 1993 [where he announced the proof of Fermat’s theorem, ndr] might be worth going to”. The bound goes down from 4ᵏ to (4-d)ᵏ, for d > 0. Doesn’t seem like much, but theoretically groundbreaking. See also Tao’s comment.
[⚠️ Preprint] One shape can tile the plane aperiodically! Down from the two found by Penrose. The shape is rather simple, proving aperiodicity is the hard bit. There is even a tool to construct patches of “hats”. Memes abound.
📣 Expository mathematics
Jennifer S. Balakrishnan’s Oberwolfach snapshot: A tale of three curves. From triangles with rational sides to rational points on curves. With loads of pictures!
👾 Academia & education
How eLife’s proposal of publishing any paper they send out for peer review, alongside the reviewer’s comments and a small summary, is doing. See also the reply of Eisen — editor-in-chief of eLife — to Leptin’s criticism ⬇️.
« […] Maria Leptin, president of the European Research Council. “If I want to learn about a new field that is not core to my own, then I want a trustworthy source that filters for general interest,” she says. “eLife now does its filtering upstream, in a non-transparent, unaccountable way.” »
Mathematics in Context: the Pedagogy of Liberation. How social and cultural contexts inform mathematical teaching in the classroom.
« Looking at history through a mathematical lens is a step toward humanizing math. As children learn how to create their own graphs and charts, they can also interrogate how the nexus of history, math and humanity lies in the formation of the question to be answered. Whose story is not being told? What question was not asked? The data is only as good as the questions that birthed it, and if the assumptions under which the questions were formed are biased and racist, then the math is inevitably racist as well. »
🇮🇹 Shameless self-promotion
Ho scritto sulle nuove stime per i numeri di Ramsey. Inevitabilmente ho parlato di Sanremo 2023, perché devo ancora riprendermi.
Il 29 marzo alle 21:00 sarò in live con Daniela Volpatto, dottoranda del gruppo di Quantitative Biology (q-Bio) dell’Università di Torino, per Meet Science. Parleremo di tumori, statistica e domande assurde per i biologi.
→ You can find me on Twitter as ramellus, on Instagram (in 🇮🇹) as simone.ramello and on my website.