Brief News from the Math World

The December issue of the Notices of the AMS is out. It is not one of the most interesting I have seen, but it has a report on the International Congress of Mathematicians 2006 by Allyn Jackson, and a report on the 2006 Fulkerson Prize.

Terence Tao continues to collect prizes and awards. He has also landed the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize.

Anders Claesson, from the combinatorics group at Reykjavík University, has pointed out the following two math blogs to me: Mathematics under the Microscope and A Neighbourhood of Infinity. Maybe some of you might enjoy looking at them.

Bill Gasarch has a guest post on the Complexity Weblog on the topic of private information retrieval. He mentions the following papers:

An Ω(n^1/3) lower bound for bilinear group based Private Information Retrieval by Alexander Razborov and Sergey Yekhanin, FOCS 2006.

New Locally Decodable Codes and Private Information Retrieval Schemes, by Sergey Yekhanin

Apparently, the former paper models 2-Database-Private Information Retrieval via Latin Squares and then uses representation theory of finite groups to push through the lower bound. The latter uses Mersenne primes.

I have not looked at the papers, but that sounds like yet another application of very hard maths in volume A TCS.