COSMOS MAGAZINE

5 of our favourite maths stories from 2024

Subtracting the myths out of maths These days, a mathematician at the University of Melbourne can use a laptop to predict weather 12 weeks in advance. In fact, Associate Professor Guoqi Qian, who reckons he’ll soon be able to predict rainfall a year ahead of time, makes a point of avoiding energy-hungry supercomputers.

Making maths count Mathematics took Professor Yihong Du from post-Cultural Revolution China to Australia, where he is developing partial differential equation (PDE) theory and cracking open the mysteries surrounding population dynamics.

Largest known prime number discovered A number with more than 40 million digits has been discovered to be the largest known prime number by a network of amateurs. The number has 41,024,320 digits and was found by 36-year-old researcher and former NVIDIA employee Luke Durant on 12 October. It was tested on other computers using different programs and confirmed prime on 19 October.

Mathematicians find method in the madness The famously difficult-to-read Finnegans Wake is a mathematical outlier. Researchers found that James Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness writing breaks punctuation rules that are generally rigid in European-language literature. But they also found that Finnegans Wake has a punctuation pattern all of its own.

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