Ars Mathematica

Finding those math theorems or conjectures just too hard to prove? Then, you need to attend this workshop.

According to Steven Colbert on tonight’s Colbert Report, equations are the devil’s sentences. For the past couple of days, this site has been under relentless spam attack (the spam has been showing up in older posts, so no one sees them but me). Clearly, these two events are related.

Via Neighborhood of Infinity, I came across the Flyspeck Project, a project to provide a computer-checked proof of the Kepler conjecture.

The project who proposed by Thomas Hales, who has the only published proof of the theorem. His proof already includes some computer calculations, and turned out to be too complicated to be fully checked by peer review. A complete computer-checked proof would remove any doubts.

The Wikipedia entry links to this elementary introduction by Hales to the proof, Cannonballs and Honeycomb.

Understanding of geometry is innate, and cannot be learnt. Discuss.

Justin Mullins, a British artist, takes photographs of mathematical equations and diagrams. He currently has an exhibition of his work at Lauderdale House, in Highgate, London, UK.

I spotted an interesting paper on arXiv with a totally self-explanatory title: On the uniformization of algebraic curves.