Grigori Perelman, 54
Alex Gerko, 41
Demis Hassabis, 44
Terence Tao, 45
Sir Martin Hairer, 45
Alexandra Botez, 25
Wang Pok Lo, 16
Sir Roger Penrose, 89
Jim Simons, 83
Hou Yifan, 26
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Milo Beckman was studying advanced algebra when he was 8. By 15, he was a Harvard prodigy. Now aged just 25, he’s written a brilliant book that takes everything we know (and fear) about maths out of the equation – starting with numbers.
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Dr Jamie Frost’s tuition website went viral during lockdown, helping millions of pupils around the world with their studies.
A London mathematics teacher has been shortlisted for a $1m (£780,000) international teaching prize after his tuition website went global during lockdown, helping millions of pupils in the UK and around the world to continue their maths studies at home.
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As well as institutional rankings, The Sunday Times and The Times have identified the centres of excellence within each of 67 subject areas. The subject rankings are based on student opinion on teaching quality and their wider university experiences, combined with the outcomes of the 2014 research assessments, graduate job prospects and course entry standards.
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NB Parents can nominate children. Please see the rules at the bottom of this page.
The Maths Masterclass Tutorials are an intense programme of FREE online Maths tuition designed to stretch and challenge the very best young mathematicians
Following the huge success of our pilot in May, we are now scaling up to a year-long FREE programme. The Maths Masterclass Tutorials programme is delivered by TalentEd in partnership with best-selling author Dr. Simon Singh.
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Martin Hairer takes $3m Breakthrough prize for work a colleague said must have been done by aliens.
A mathematician who tamed a nightmarish family of equations that behave so badly they make no sense has won the most lucrative prize in academia.
Martin Hairer, an Austrian-British researcher at Imperial College London, is the winner of the 2021 Breakthrough prize for mathematics, an annual $3m (£2.3m) award that has come to rival the Nobels in terms of kudos and prestige.
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Covid maths/statistics.
Did you get the all clear in your daily cancer check this week? Of course you did not have one. Even after decades of trying it has proved extremely difficult to find regular tests that do not do more harm than good by wrongly telling healthy people they are ill. These basic statistics explain why scientists are very sceptical about Boris Johnson’s “Operation Moonshot”.
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A boy of 15 is well on his way to becoming the youngest British male to hold the title
He started reciting poetry at the age of one, studied with the Open University when he was nine and passed an A-level equivalent maths exam at the tender age of twelve.
Now Wang Pok Lo, a prodigy whose family moved to Scotland from Hong Kong, is poised to become the youngest British male to hold a PhD.
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Stories and mathematics have always been woven together in my mind – two foundational ways of looking at the world, not incompatible but complementary. When I was growing up, my mother told me myths and fairytales at bedtime, while my father recounted stories of famous mathematicians and gave me his favourite maths riddles to try to solve. Which is maybe why in my new novel, The Tenth Muse, I try to bring the two together, while challenging the many mistaken assumptions people hold about maths. My protagonist is a brilliant and ambitious mathematician who happens to be a woman tackling one of her subject’s most pressing conundrums.
I hope her journey provides a history of mathematics and the ways it has changed the world, the challenges women in particular have faced in trying to join its professional ranks, and a glimpse of how exhilarating it can be. My favourite kind of maths reveals the outer reaches of the imagination and how in finding a solution it is possible to illuminate an idea. Maths can shine a light on both the simplest and most complex things; the same is true of my favourite literature.
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Thanks to the information revolution, a stunning 90% of the data created by humanity has been generated in just the past two years.
Yet the math taught in U.S. schools hasn’t materially changed since Sputnik was sent into orbit in the late 1950s. Our high school students are taught algebra, geometry, a second year of algebra, and calculus (for the most advanced students) because Eisenhower-era policymakers believed this curriculum would produce the best rocket scientists to work on projects during the Cold War.
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Another year, another wave of students trampling across autumn leaves, making their way to their first lectures heady with a cocktail of excitement, apprehension and a nasty hangover. But while every year brings new faces, one feature of the academic landscape remains ever-present: the huge, imposing blackboards.
Now photographer Jessica Wynne, a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, has thrown a spotlight on this workhorse of academic endeavour, travelling across the US and beyond to capture the blackboards of mathematicians.
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The key to better health, both financial and physical, could involve a mathematical brain teaser.
Psychologists have found that those with higher numeracy skills tend to make better decisions that affect their physical wellbeing as well as their finances.
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A friend spotted this and knew I would be interested.
Something very exciting happened last Friday when one of my pupils, Chika Ofili, popped into the classroom and asked if he could tell me something he had thought of over the summer holidays. I was intrigued. I had given him a book called First Steps for Problem Solvers (published by the UKMT) to look at over the holidays and inside the book was a list of the divisibility tests, which are used to quickly work out whether a number is exactly divisible by either 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9 before you actually start dividing. Except that there was no test listed for checking divisibility by 7. The reason why it was missing is because there is no easy or memorable test for dividing by 7, or so I thought!
In a bored moment, Chika had turned his mind to the problem and this is what he came up with. He realised that if you take the last digit of any whole number, multiply it by 5 and then add this to the remaining part of the number, you will get a new number. And it turns out that if this new number is divisible by 7, then the original number is divisible by 7. What an easy test!
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Schoolchildren in deprived areas are being given the chance to learn about enterprise as well as maths.
James Ludlow, head teacher of the King’s Church of England School in Wolverhampton, often stops pupils in the corridor to ask them what they want to do in the future. For years, the answer has always been the same: “I don’t know, sir.”
The secondary school contends with some of the toughest conditions in the country for providing education. Its near-700 students are drawn from 40 different primary schools and speak more than 40 languages. One pupil who joined recently had escaped the war in Syria.
In the past year, however, answers to the head’s corridor question have become far more varied as a new focus on providing careers skills has started to pay off. Pupils talk regularly to entrepreneurs and business leaders and are invited to work at local companies — including the Mount, a plush hotel where visiting Premier League teams stay if they are playing Wolverhampton Wanderers.
King’s is playing a small part in a quiet revolution in schools. Along with English, maths and science, pupils are being taught the skills required to start businesses and thrive as workers in a changing economy that values entrepreneurship as much as it does qualifications in traditional subjects.
At the same time, the push — both by government and private interests — is helping improve social mobility by addressing one of the big inequities in the business world: a shortfall in working- class entrepreneurs.
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