### Illustrating the Impact of the Mathematical Sciences

A series of posters and some other related media were produced by the National Academy of Sciences of the USA to showcase mathematics of the twenty-first century and its applications in the real world: link. If you still don’t know what to put on your office walls, have a look at those posters!

### Status-Bias im Peer-Review

In der aktuellen Forschung & Lehre ist ein Beitrag mit dem Titel Status-Bias im Peer-Review-Verfahren, den ich sehr interessant fand. Der Beitrag beginnt mit folgenden Worten: Forschungsarbeiten von renommierten Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftlern werden trotz gleicher Qualität im Peer-Review-Verfahren deutlich besser bewertet als Arbeiten weniger bekannter Forschender. Zu diesem Ergebnis kommt ein Wissenschaftlerteam um Professor Jürgen … Continue reading "Status-Bias im Peer-Review"

Recently I stumbled upon the following two conjectures about polynomials: The first one is the Jacobian conjecture: We have polynomials $$f_1, \ldots, f_n$$ in the variables $$x_1, \ldots, x_n$$ with coefficients in a field $$k$$ of non-zero characteristic. We define a function $$F\colon k^n \to k^n$$ by setting \[F(x_1, \ldots, x_n) := (f_1(x_1, \ldots, x_n), … Continue reading "Conjectures about polynomials"

### Announcing a result on the arXiv

Today Rachel Greenfeld and Terence Tao announced via the arXiv that they can disprove the periodic tiling conjecture (arXiv:2209.08451). I do not want to discuss here in detail the contents of the conjecture or their approach to disprove it (if you are interested in this, you can read about it on Tao’s blog). What I … Continue reading "Announcing a result on the arXiv"

### Predicting the future of arbitrary functions

Let $$S$$ be any non-empty set. If you have a function $$f\colon \mathbb{R} \to S$$ and you tell me its values on an interval $$(-\infty,t)$$, can I predict which value it will have at the time $$t$$? If the function is continuous, then of course I can; and in general not. Now interestingly, if you … Continue reading "Predicting the future of arbitrary functions"

### Message from the EMS president

In the last EMS Magazine (2021/No. 121) Volker Mehrmann reflected in his editorial (link) on the bygone (virtual) European Congress 8ECM. At the end he asked to write to him our opinions about the matters that he addressed, which I did. I want to share here now my e-mail to him with you: Lieber Volker, … Continue reading "Message from the EMS president"

### New book about Freedman’s proof

Today I learnt from an article in the QuantaMagazine (link to article) that there is finally a new book trying to explain Freedman’s proof of the 4-dimensional Poincaré conjecture (link to book). The article is fun to read since it contains statements of the involved people about how the whole ‘situation’ about the non-understandable write-up … Continue reading "New book about Freedman’s proof"

### Computer assisted verification of contemporary mathematics

Half a year ago Steffen Kionke wrote a blog post on condensed mathematics wherein he mentioned that Peter Scholze put up a challenge to formally verify a key fundamental result of a joint paper with Clausen: a result Scholze terms his most important theorem to date. Today I want to inform you that the mentioned … Continue reading "Computer assisted verification of contemporary mathematics"