Fortnightly links (20)

Katie Steckles, New twin primes found is the only announcement I have seen of the biggest twin prime pair found so far. It has more than twice the number of digits of the previous record. Have twin primes lost their sexiness after Zhang's breakthrough?

Edward Dunne, Metadata is an intriguing insight in the inner workings of Mathematical Reviews, and how the metadata about articles is handled.

It is moreover possible to access this vast wealth of metadata via an API, which is something I did as a proof of concept more than a year ago as a BibTeX scraper. It turns out that I never linked to this on my blog. At some point I should revisit this code, adding an arXiv and zbMath scraper. If you are interested in helping me out, please do!

John Lesieutre, A projective variety with discrete, non-finitely generated automorphism group is what is says it is. John is someone who is really good at coming up with awesome geometric constructions, he also constructed 3-dimensional counterexamples to Kawamata's conjecture.

There is a really nice blog post by Daniel Litt about this preprint, and I suggest that you all add his blog to your feed readers (assuming I'm not the only dinosaur still using such things). There is also John's answer to the corresponding MathOverflow question by Brian Conrad, where the resulting variety is described as

The example is a smooth, uniruled sixfold of Picard rank somewhere in the high 30s.

And to conclude, Claire Voisin wins the gold medal of the CNRS.