{"id":8363,"date":"2016-03-16T12:04:51","date_gmt":"2016-03-16T16:04:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=8363"},"modified":"2016-03-22T16:53:09","modified_gmt":"2016-03-22T20:53:09","slug":"number-theory-news-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=8363","title":{"rendered":"Number Theory News"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Andrew Wiles is the recipient of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.abelprize.no\/c67107\/seksjon\/vis.html?tid=67108&#038;strukt_tid=67107\">this year&#8217;s Abel Prize<\/a>.  I have to confess that I found this surprising, since I assumed he&#8217;d already won this. His work in general and specifically the work that led to the proof of Fermat&#8217;s Last Theorem is on any reasonable list of the top few achievements in mathematics in recent decades.\n<p>If you haven&#8217;t seen the documentary about the FLT proof, you really should, it was a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/programmes\/b0074rxx\">BBC Horizon<\/a> show in the UK, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wgbh\/nova\/proof\/\">Nova<\/a> here in the US, transcript <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wgbh\/nova\/transcripts\/2414proof.html\">here<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d heard and Nature <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/news\/fermat-s-last-theorem-earns-andrew-wiles-the-abel-prize-1.19552\">confirms<\/a> that Wiles has for quite a while now been working quietly on the BSD Conjecture, maybe some day there will be another very dramatic moment in the subject, and another documentary.\n<\/li>\n<li>Erica Klarreich at Quanta has <a href=\"https:\/\/www.quantamagazine.org\/20160313-mathematicians-discover-prime-conspiracy\/\">the story<\/a> of a <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1603.03720\">surprising new result about prime numbers<\/a> from Kannan Soundararajan and Rober Lemke Oliver. They have found that, given a prime number with a certain last digit, there are different probability for the last digit of the next one (among the various possibilities).  This violates usual assumptions that such things are in some sense &#8220;random&#8221;, indicating just how subtle this &#8220;randomness&#8221; is.\n<p>For more details, there&#8217;s an <a href=\"https:\/\/terrytao.wordpress.com\/2016\/03\/14\/biases-between-consecutive-primes\/\">excellent blog post from Terry Tao<\/a>.  This might be a good time to point out that people sometimes complain about the quality of coverage of scientific advances aimed at non-experts.  From what I&#8217;ve seen in recent years, the coverage of mathematics advances has been of extremely high quality, with this story a good example.\n<\/li>\n<li>April 29 is the release date for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0787524\/\">The Man Who Knew Infinity<\/a>, a film about the life of Ramanujan.  It&#8217;s based on a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.robertkanigel.com\/_i__b_the_man_who_knew_infinity__b___a_life_of_the_genius_ramanujan__i__58016.htm\">great biography<\/a> and a fascinating story.  I hope this turns out better than <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=7365\">the similar situation with the film about Turing<\/a>. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>:  It turns out that an astronomer, Chung-Ming Ko, had already a while ago done some calculations showing non-randomness in the last digits of primes, see <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/pii\/S0960077901001357\">here<\/a>.  The new paper has been updated to refer to that.<\/p>\n<p>Reports about the Ramanujan film are that they took great pains to get the mathematics right, with Ken Ono and Manjul Bhargava working extensively on the film.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Andrew Wiles is the recipient of this year&#8217;s Abel Prize. I have to confess that I found this surprising, since I assumed he&#8217;d already won this. His work in general and specifically the work that led to the proof of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=8363\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8363"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8371,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8363\/revisions\/8371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}