News Update (September-October 2019)

Dr. Neena Gupta: Youngest and Third Woman ever to win the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize

Dr. Gupta is an Associate Professor at the Statistics and Mathematics Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata. She is the youngest mathematician to propose a solution to the 70 years old Zariski Cancellation Conjecture, a long-pending problem in algebraic geometry. She is recognized as the youngest ever to win this prize as she is yet to be 35.She was previously a visiting scientist at the ISI and also a visiting fellow at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). She has received B.M. Birla Science Prize in Mathematics in 2017, the Swarna Jayanti Fellowship Award in 2015 and the Ramanujan Prize from the University of Madras in 2014.

Nobel Prize for Physics, 2019

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2019 was awarded “for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos” with one half to James Peebles, the other half jointly to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz.

James Peebles’ insights into physical cosmology have laid a foundation for the transformation of cosmology over the last fifty years, from speculation to science. His theoretical framework, developed since the mid-1960s, is the basis of our contemporary ideas about the universe.

In October 1995, at the Haute-Provence Observatory in southern France, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz announced the first discovery of a planet outside our solar system, an exoplanet, 51 Pegasi b which is a gaseous ball comparable with the solar system’s biggest gas giant, Jupiter, orbiting a solar-type star in our home galaxy, the Milky Way.

Do Not Erase

This picture and several others were published (“When Theory Meets Chalk, Dust Flies”) in the New York Times on September 24, 2019, with a text by Times Science reporter Dennis Overbye. “For the last year, Jessica Wynne, a photographer and professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, has been photographing mathematicians’ blackboards, finding art in the swirling gangs of symbols sketched in the heat of imagination, argument and speculation.”

Do Not Erase is a book of Jessica Wynne’s photographs of mathematicians’ blackboards, coming out in Fall 2020 from Princeton University Press.

Golden Ratio observed in Human Skull

In a new study investigating whether skull shape follows the Golden Ratio (1.618…), Johns Hopkins researchers compared 100 human skulls to 70 skulls from six other animals, and found that the human skull dimensions followed the Golden Ratio. The skulls of less related species such as dogs, two kinds of monkeys, rabbits, lions and tigers, however, diverged from this ratio.

“The other mammals we surveyed actually have unique ratios that approach the Golden Ratio with increased species sophistication,” says Rafael Tamargo, M.D., professor of neurosurgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “We believe that this finding may have important anthropological and evolutionary implications.

‘Poor man’s qubit’ can solve quantum problems without going quantum

Researchers have built and demonstrated the first hardware for a probabilistic computer, a possible way to bridge the gap between classical and quantum computing. Engineers at Purdue University and Tohoku University in Japan have built the first hardware to demonstrate how the fundamental units of what would be a probabilistic computer — called p-bits — are capable of performing a calculation that quantum computers would usually be called upon to perform.

Mathematicians develop new statistical indicator

Up to now, it has taken a great deal of computational effort to detect dependencies between more than two high-dimensional variables, in particular when complicated non-linear relationships are involved. Mathematicians have now developed a dependence measure called ‘distance multivariance’. “To calculate the dependence measure, not only the values of the observed variables themselves, but also their mutual distances are recorded and from these distance matrices, the distance multivariance is calculated. This intermediate step allows for the detection of complex dependencies, which the usual correlation coefficient would simply ignore. Our method can be applied to questions in bioinformatics, where big data sets need to be analysed.”

Study suggests ice on lunar South Pole may have more than one source

Shackleton Crater, the floor of which is permanently shadowed from the sun, appears to be home to deposits of water ice. A new study sheds light on how old these and other deposits on the Moon’s south pole might be. A new study published in the journal Icarus suggests that while a majority of those deposits are likely billions of years old, some may be much more recent.

The ages of these deposits can potentially tell us something about the origin of the ice, which helps us understand the sources and distribution of water in the inner solar system.

Black holes stunt growth of dwarf galaxies

Astronomers at the University of California, Riverside, have discovered that powerful winds driven by supermassive black holes in the centers of dwarf galaxies have a significant impact on the evolution of these galaxies by suppressing star formation.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which maps more than 35% of the sky, to identify 50 dwarf galaxies, 29 of which showed signs of being associated with black holes in their centers. Six of these 29 galaxies showed evidence of winds—specifically, high-velocity ionized gas outflows—emanating from their active black holes.