Mathematics News Fred Yuengling Here's news through early January. Thanks to all of you for allowing me to moderate last year's roundtable and to compile the mathematics news section of the PAM Bulletin. Cindy Mader will begin writing the column in May. See you in Nashville.
SIAM Project Euclid
Scout Report
From the 12/5/03 issue of the NSDL Scout Report for Mathematics Engineering and Technology (http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/), I found the following entry particularly interesting.
In 1900, mathematician David Hilbert outlined 23 problems "as challenges for the 20th century." Now in the 21st century, three of the problems remain unsolved. However, the problems are one step closer to being resolved. As described in a November 27, 2003 new article, a Swedish mathematics student has developed a partial solution to one of them. The article discusses the achievement and provides links to the student's homepage and the text of Hilbert's original problems. A website from Bielefeld University in Germany lists all 23 problems and provides links to research papers devoted to their analysis and solution.
SLA Conference
Finally, to get ready for Nashville, here are the web sites of the Vanderbilt University Department of Mathematics (http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/math) and Library (http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/).
feyuengl@ucsc.edu
American Mathematical Society News
Michael Shafer, a 26-year-old graduate student in chemical engineering, has discovered the largest known prime number. The number is 220,996,011-1, and is 6,320,430 digits long. The discovery was part of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) project, in which over 60,000 volunteers from around the world take part. The news of this 40th known Mersenne prime is posted on the GIMPS website, http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm .
James G. Arthur, of the University of Toronto, is the new President Elect of the AMS. His term as President Elect officially begins on February 1, 2004. All election results are now online at
http://www.ams.org/secretary/ams-election-results.html.
Richard Hamilton (Columbia University) and Terence Tao (UCLA) have been awarded the 2003 Clay Research Awards, which recognize extraordinary achievement in mathematics. Hamilton was recognized for his introduction of the Ricci flow equation and his development of it into one of the most powerful tools in geometry and topology. Tao was recognized for his ground-breaking work in analysis, notably his optimal restriction theorems in Fourier analysis, his work on the wave map equation, and his global existence theorems for KdV type equations. See the Clay Mathematics Institute website for more information on the award winners, their research, and the Institute, http://www.claymath.org/.
While on the subject of prizes, I came across this "Prizes, Awards, and Lectures" page, http://www.siam.org/prizes,
on the SIAM site, which lists and describes the various prizes administered by SIAM and partner organizations...it's worth a look.
Of note was a posting to the PAM listserv on Jan. 5, 2004 announcing the forthcoming addition in early 2004 of 8 new journals to the Euclid Prime collection. The new titles are:
The complete list of mathematics and statistics journals available through Project Euclid can be found at: http://projecteuclid.org/Dienst/UI/1.0/TitleShort.
