This just in...
“A person who can, within a year, solve x² — 92y² = 1 is a mathematician.”
Developments in mathematics itself often occur only very gradually — and sometimes need hundreds of years to run their course! — but developments of interest to the participants in a math circle can sometimes pop up pretty suddenly. Here’s where we’ll try to keep you posted on them, as soon as we learn of them ourselves.
The Yau Awards
UC Riverside’s Professor Yat Sun Poon has recently written to the Stanford Math Circle to call our attention to the S. T. Yau High School Mathematics Awards.
Named after Fields medalist Shing-Tung Yau, these generously funded awards seek to encourage and recognize ambitious, large-scale investigative projects undertaken (and, we presume, successfully completed) by high school students. The rules permit participating students to form teams of up to three members, and they assume the involvement of an adult coach (and possibly also a mathematics faculty mentor.)
Submissions for this year’s Yau Awards are due on 30 August, and the organizers want you to notify them of your intent to participate by 30 June, so it may be hard to meet their deadlines this time around. (Ambitious, large-scale mathematical investigations often take quite a while to complete, as Brahmagupta well understood.) But the Yau Awards seem like an extremely good idea, and we hope that some of our regular participants here at the Stanford Math Circle will decide to compete for them.
What’s it like?
“Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.”
Have you ever wondered what it’s like actually to be a mathematician? Well, you’ll soon have an unusually good chance to find out. The Stanford Math Circle is about to begin an occasional series of informal interviews with eminent mathematicians who have agreed to answer our questions, and share their stories, about the actual practice of the art. How does it feel to grapple with problems that nobody knows how to solve? Where do ideas come from? What do you do when you get stuck? Don’t you sometimes feel overwhelmed by all the things you don't know? Who inspires you, and why? What’s more important: imagination or knowledge? These are the sorts of questions we’re thinking of asking. We’re not expecting the kind of answers you can explain to a computer, but we’re pretty sure we’ll learn a lot from them, even so.
The new interview series will begin on 7 July. Our first guest will be the Stanford Math Circle’s own faculty sponsor, Professor Ravi Vakil (whose delightful little book for young mathematicians, A Mathematical Mosaic, reveals his keen sensitivity to the interests and needs of the Circle's audience.) For roughly the first two-thirds of the evening, the Circle's Director will interview Professor Vakil, and then the floor will be open for questions from the audience. Don’t miss it!