Arnold on mathematics

Posted on 05/08/2026 by Peter Cameron

In 1981, the Soviet mathematician V. I. Arnold wrote a little book attempting to explain catastrophe theory to a general audience. It was translated into English by R. K. Thomas and published with the title Catastrophe Theory by Springer in 1983.

At the time, catastrophe theory was somewhat controversial, having its strong proponents and equally strong opponents. It seems to me that Arnold’s attitude was that catastrophe theory is a dose of low-dimensional singularity theory, obscured by a large cloud of mysticism. In the final chapter, “The Mystics of Catastrophe Theory”, he writes:

The nice results of singularity theory are happily not dependent on the dark mystics of catastrophe theory. But in singularity theory, as in all mathematics, there is an element of the mysterious: mathematical objects and theories, which at first seem quite independent, turn out to be closely related.

One example of such a relationship is the enigmatic (though partly understood) A, D, E-classification. It occurs in such diverse areas of mathematics as, for example, critical points of functions, Lie algebras, categories of linear spaces, caustics, wavefronts, regular polyhedra in three-dimensional space, and the Coxeter crystallographic reflection groups.

In another chapter, on “Symplectic and contact geometries”, he speculates more generally on the future of mathematics:

As each skylark must display its comb, so every branch of mathematics must finally display symplecticisation. In mathematics there exist operations of different levels: funnctions acting on numbers, operators acting on functions, functors acting on operators, and so on. Symplecticisation belongs to the small set of highest level operations, acting not on details (functions, operators, functors) but on all the mathematics at once. Although some such highest level operations are known (for example, algebraisation, Bourbakisation, complexification, superisation, symplecticisation) there is as yet no axiomatic theory describing them.

I suppose that categorification now has to join this select group. The only thing that they definitely all have in common is that they are not beautiful words.

Posted in mathematics | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Entropy, partitions, groups and AI

Posted on 23/07/2026 by Peter Cameron

Last night some of the strands of gamgee inside my skull connected up and I remembered something I learned nearly 14 years ago, which I think is relevant to the discussion of AI in mathematics, and in particular to the Birch test.

So I ask you to imagine some counterfactual history. Suppose that the real history I relate below had not occurred, but an AI robot came up with the following. Let A,B,C,D be subgroups of a finite group G. Then

|A∩B|·|A∩C|·(|B∩C|·|B∩D|·|C∩D|)3

≤ (|A|·|B|)2·|D|·|A∩D|·|A∩B∩C|·|B∩C∩D|4.

(I hope I typed that right.)

What would your reaction be?

I expect mine would have been “Who cares?”

But suppose that I told you that this was a consequence of two major results in information theory, namely

  • the first non-Shannon entropy inequality for random variables on a finite probability space, by Zhang and Yeung in 1998; and
  • the proof by Chan and Yeung in 2002 that the entropy function of any finite family of random variables on a finite probability space can be approximated arbitrarily closely by the entropy function of a family of group random variables: these are defined by a family of subgroups of a finite group, where the ith random variable ssays “choose uniformly a coset of the ith subgroup”.

Then I suspect you would find it rather more interesting. (The entropy function gives the entropies of all the random variables and all products of subsets of them.)

The way I found out about this is as follows. My colleague Søren Riis, in the computer science department at Queen Mary, had a grant to work on network coding (another fascinating topic in information theory). At the end of the grant there was enough money left to run a small conference, and he invited Terence Chan to speak. Terence told us about the group-theoretic result cited above, and sketched a proof on the wonderful whiteboard tables in the common room after his talk. I gave a talk about this later; you can find the slides here.

So now the question would be: in my counterfactual scenario, did the robot pass the Birch test or not?

I am inclined to say no. I have several times challenged people to find a group-theoretic application of the strange inequality. Nobody has ever done so.

So the interest here is not the result but the evidence for the interconnectedness of mathematics.

A more interesting question, perhaps, is in general whether entropy can be of any use in the study of finite groups. A family of subgroups and their intersections is after all just a meet-semilattice of the subgroup lattice; such things arise in the theory of imprimitive groups and in that of diagonal groups, two topics on which I have written substantial papers with excellent coauthors.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

I read the news today, oh boy

Posted on 22/07/2026 by Peter Cameron

In the last two hours, the following three news items have appeared on the BBC website:

  1. Ex Southern Water boss among four charged over alleged plan to manipulate water quality tests
  2. US to announce deal allowing Saudi Arabia a nuclear programme, reports say
  3. OpenAI says its AI went rogue and launched “unprecedented” cyber-attack on another company

Be very afraid!

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

AI for the working mathematician

Posted on 22/07/2026 by Peter Cameron

I have not been well for a while; my brain has turned to gamgee, and I find it difficult to concentrate on hard mathematics. So let me try to get things working by an easier warm-up exercise.

There has been a lot of change recently in the mathematical capabilities of AI systems. I understand that it was not so long ago when they didn’t know what 2+2 was, and had to look it up. Now eminent mathematicians and computer scientists such as Don Knuth and Tim Gowers are professing themselves impressed by the capabilities of these systems.

Can they be useful to the working mathematician? I can see three possible ways this could happen, all with significant risks. At present, AI systems are like gifted but extremely careless students; their outputs have to be checked very carefully!

Proof checking

This idea is from Kevin Buzzard, and I was reminded of it in his beautiful talk to the London Mathematical Society earlier this month (wHich has now appeared on the YouTube channel; do take a look!). If you use a LaTeX editor such as Overleaf, you will know that it flags your LaTeX errors as you type. Kevin envisages a system which will check your proofs and flag your mathematical errors as you type.

The basic idea is simple. AI is traditionally not bad at translation; so use it to translate a human proof into a formal proof checking system such as Lean (of which Kevin is a great supporter). Then feed the result into the Lean compiler, and see whether it flags an error; if not, you are in good shape.

This would be great for someone like me, who doesn’t need yet another journal publication. If the system found that my proofs were correct, I could put the paper on the arXiv with a note to this effect, and readers could safely use the result.

There are two dangers. The most significant is that the translation needs to be checked, since AI translations are notoriously unreliable; this is a lot of work and requires a lot of expertise in Lean, so if you have this expertise you could simply do the translation yourself.

The second, which Kevin mentioned, is that this system might be developed by a large corporation which then charges us to use it, and of course I wouldn’t be able to pay. All the current facilities most useful to me (TeX, GAP, R, the arXiv, Zentralblatt für Mathematik, diamond OA journals) are free. But maybe, once the genie is out of the bottle, someone will produce a free version, as happened with R.

Proof assistant

If AI can solve mathematical problems, can it help me prove my big theorem by knocking off some of the difficulties I meet along the way? Probably yes, and almost certainly it will be used for this purpose. I have already had to review one paper in which it had apparently been used like this. (Fortunately it lay outside my competence, so I didn’t have to face the issue head-on.)

All I can say is that, while I am happy to attribute some of the best ideas in my papers to my co-authors, I would be less happy acknowledging a computer; but this is my problem, not AI’s.

The risk here is: once the computer can solve non-trivial problems arising in a project, how do we assign topics to PhD students? They need something which requires some creativity to solve, and gives some sense of achievement; a problem which can be solved by pressing a few keys will not do the job.

We have faced something similar before. In the 1960s and 1970s, a lot of PhD student time was spent computing character tables of the recently discovered sporadic simple groups. Now this can be done in computer algebra systems like GAP very simply. I invite you to compare and contrast the two situations. I think the one we face now is much more serious.

Autonomous mathematician

How long until we see the robots doing mathematics independently of human intervention?

Yang-Hui He, of the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences, and his colleagues devised what they called the Birch test, for whether a computer is capable of independent mathematical discovery. This is inspired by the Turing test, and commemorates the work of Bryan Birch and Peter Swinnerton-Dyer who made an early use of the computer as an experimental tool in coming up with their celebrated conjecture. You can red about it here.

To pass the Birch test, the computer must meet three requirements (I quote Yang’s description):

  1. Automaticity: it is completely made by AI from pattern-spotting, without any human intervention;
  2. Interpretability: any statement – conjecture or conclusion – must be precise to a human mathematician, who cannot distinguish it from one given by a human colleague;
  3. Non-triviality: it is non-trivial enough that the community of human experts will work on it.

(I think that the last condition says a little more; it must be interesting enough to catch the attention of mathematicians. A many-page identity would probably not count.)

Yang feels that computers have achieved two of these but not yet all three. His own work on “murmurations” derived from the classification of elliptic curves satisfies the second and third.

In my more dystopian moments, I can imagine AI of the future coming up with a similar test for human mathematicians, where those who fail it are to be terminated. Maybe my time isn’t long …

Posted in doing mathematics, technology | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

From the Old Abbey

Posted on 26/06/2026 by Peter Cameron

A week in the Oude Abdij Drongen, near Ghent in Belgium, accompanying Rosemary to the mODa14 conference. The name of this conference gives a double role to the initials OD: model-oriented design and analysis, and optimal design, hence the typography.

Drongen Abbey was founded by the Premonstratensian order, but has been run by the Jesuits since 1837, as well as having a variety of other uses over the centuries. You can read its history here. mODa has a much shorter history, having begun in 1987, in part (as with the AAA conferences) as a channel between east and west when Europe was divided.

I had some urgent jobs, some of which got at least partially done. But some of the talks caught my interest as well.

The best talk of the conference, for my money, was a survey of Gaussian processes, by David Ginsbourger. I am not entirely sure what a Gaussian process is, but he began by asking the audience to suggest who might have invented them. His own answer was Abraham de Moivre, a French-born mathematician who moved to England to escape religious persecution and published his best work from there. Proof, if proof were needed, that immigrants, including refugees, contribute much to their host countries. He had a very interesting career: read his MacTutor biography here.

The other two talks I will mention I categorise as thought-provoking rather than exceptionally good. One was by the Mexican statistician Alan Vazquez. He had asked two chatbots to produce certain two-level fractional factorial designs with good properties (these are certain sets of 0-1 sequences; in other language, coding theory). To my astonishment, although some of the designs he asked for are in standard textbooks, and (I think) all are in databases on the Web, the chatbots failed a significant proportion of the time. Moreover, when they were asked the question repeatedly, they were unable to learn from past experience. Artificial intelligence, indeed! I did learn one new term, “Prompt Engineering”; this means structuring the way you ask the question to maximize the chance of getting a good answer.

The other was Markus Hainy, who was devising a framework to combine the results of actual physics experiments with computer simulations. I was a little surprised by this. In my opinion, the aim of a physics experiment is to challenge current theories; these theories can be disproved by experiment, but cannot be proved. This seems rather different from what he was attempting, which was to harmonize them by tuning the model, with no apparent regard for the physical theory on which the predictions are made.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

An ABC conjecture proved

Posted on 29/05/2026 by Peter Cameron

Not THE famous ABC conjecture, but a conjecture of mine with Mohammed Aljohani and John Bamberg.

A simple counting argument shows that, in any vertex-transitive graph, the product of the clique number and the independence number is at most the number of vertices.

This has extra significance because non-trivial examples meeting the bound are the obstructions to a permutation group property which we call separation arising in the theory of synchronizing automata.

This puts strong restrictions on separating permutation groups, which we assume must be transitive:

  • they must be primitive (else the disjoinot union of complete graphs on the blocks has product of clique and independence number equal to number of vertices);
  • they must be basic (else they preserve a Hamming graph, which has this property);
  • and so on …

An interesting test case is formed by the symmetric groups Sn acting on the set of k-subsets of {1,…n}. (Without loss of generality we may assume that k≤n/2.) Any graph admitting this group is defined by a subset L of {0,…k−1}, with two k-sets joined if their intersection has size in L.

Our conjecture asserted that there is a function F such that, if n ≥ F(k) and this graph attains the bound (clique number times independence number equals number of vertices), then (up to complementation) L = {0,…,t−1} for some t; a maximum clique is the set of blocks of a Steiner system S(t,k,n), and a maximum independence set is of Erdős–Ko–Rado type, all k-sets containing a fixed t-set.

This has now been proved in an arXiv preprint by Danila Cherkashin and Yakov Shubin (in his email to me, Danila attributed the proof to Yakov). The proof is remarkably short, based on the celebrated Deza–Erdős–Frankl theorem.

This result then plugs in to the famous theorem of Peter Keevash which says that there is a function G such that, if n ≥ G(k,t), the required Steiner system exists if and only if the well-known divisibility conditions for it are satisfied.

So, asymptotically, a good answer to the question of which groups of this type are separating.

Posted in exposition, mathematics | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Rules for retirement

Posted on 27/05/2026 by Peter Cameron

I am now retired, and nearly 80. My brain does not work at the same clock speed that it used to, and I am no longer paid for things which were part of the job sucuh as refereeing, conference attendance and collaboration.

On the other hand, I have seen a big upsurge in the number of such requests. So for my own sanity, I have had to make some rules. These are not hard-and-fast rules; they are guidelines which can be overruled by special circumstances.

Refereeing and reviewing

Incidentally, people used to say “refereeing”; now more and more it is “reviewing”, which suggests to me going over something you have seen before. Does anyone know why?

I no longer have funds for page charges, so I feel no obligation to referee papers for commercial journals which have such charges. Also, as I said, I can no longer count refereeing as part of the job for which I am paid. So I feel entitled to turn down refereeing requests.

On the other hand, since I strongly support diamond open access journals, I will continue refereeing for these.

Also, my rule can be overridden by a request involving a commemorative or memorial issue for a friend.

Incidentally, I think there are cases where editors could take more responsibility. I was recently asked to referee a paper whose title began with a piece of notation which was only defined for the first time in the paper. This breaks two rules I learned long ago: a title should communicate what the paper is about; and a title should not begin with notation. The editor should have rejected the paper straight away. The author showed no respect to readers and consequently had earned no respect.

Conferences

There are so many interesting conferences these days. But I am coming to realise that there are beautiful parts of the world, such as Patagonia or Vietnam, which I am never going to see. I very much dislike airports which make me extremely nervous, and flying is becoming more difficult and dangerous. So I am trying to cut down on long-distance travel and only attend relatively nearby conferences.

On the other hand, we now have the facility for on-line or hybrid conferences, and I am quite happy with that.

However, the drawback with an on-line talk is that you get very little audience feedback and usually you have no idea who you are talking to. So I have decided to set a fee for on-line conference talks. You should send me, in advance of the talk, one or a few nice pictures of your university, town, or district, so that I can have some picture in my mind of where my talk is.

Collaboration

Collaboration is the life-blood of mathematics research. Over my career, it has enormously increased, so that single-author papers are now comparatively rare. This is a wonderful development. I intend to continue collaborating, to the best of my ability. But I am in the position of having a huge volume of collaborators at present. So, reluctantly, I have to introduce a rule.

If you send me a paper that you want me to collaborate on, please don’t start the file with hundreds of lines inputting various, probably incompatible, packages and personal macros. They may make your life easier, but they make mine more difficult, since I have to keep going back to see what these macros actually do. For one example, my LaTeX-aware editor understands “\begin{enumerate}” and “\end{enumerate}”, but if for your own convenience you redefine these as, say, “\be” and “\ee”, my editor no longer recognises them, and distractingly marks things are errors.

On the other hand, I am happy with transparent macros such as defining “\Aut” to mean “\mathop{\mathrm{Aut}}\nolimits”.

This is at its most extreme in editing a book with contributions from several authors. In one case I had to deal with, loading different authors’ packages in one author caused one to be overwritten by the other so that it had the wrong effect, and in the other order caused an error which simply stopped the compilation.

Please keep it simple!

I used to spend a long time trying to make my preprints look as good as possible. When I realised that all this work was wasted if the paper was published in a journal with its own style file, I decided that the less explicit formatting I did myself, the better.

Finally, to my many valued collaborators: I beg your patience, please bear with me. I will try to get to our joint work when I can.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Three easy proofs of Pythagoras’ Theorem

Posted on 08/05/2026 by Peter Cameron

Take a right-angled triangle with hypotenuse c and the other two sides a and b. Pythagoras’ Theorem tells us that c2 = a2+b2.

Triangle

Let the area of the triangle be A. We know that A = ab/2 (since an a×b rectangle is cut into two such triangles by a diagonal).

Here are three simple proofs, not in the least original. All use the same diagram, constructed as follows. Take a square with side a+b. At each corner, measure a distance a along the side in the clockwise direction and b along the side in the anticlockwise direction. Complete these two segments to a rectangle, and draw the diagonal not containing the corner where you began.

Squares

You will see, in addition to the original square, a tilted square with side c, and an inner small square with side a−b.

First proof: The outer square is made up of the tilted square and four copies of the triangle. So (a+b)2 = c2+4A, which on simplifying gives c2 = a2+b2.

Second proof: The tilted sqiare is made up of the inner sauqre and four copies of the triangle. So c2 = (a−b)2+4A, which on simplifying gives c2 = a2+b2.

Third proof: These two proofs are in a sense dual to each other, so here is a “self-dual” proof, with the added advantage that it is not necessary to know the value of A. The area of the tilted triangle is the average of the areas of the inner and outer squares, since the difference in either direction is four triangles. So c2 = ½[(a+b)2+(a−b)2], which on simplifying gives c2 = a2+b2.
These simple proofs of a not-so-simple theorem call for a couple of philosophical remarks.

  • Why three proofs, when one is sufficient to establish the result? Not all of us are perfect logicians; and for the rest of us, three proofs are more convincing than one. “What I tell you three times is true”, as the Bellman said.
  • As with any proof using a diagram, certain things are obvious from the diagram but a formal proof lies rather deeper. For example, why do congruent triangles have the same area? This depends on the fact that Euclidean transformations (translations, rotations, reflections, etc.) preserve area; so, eventually, it is a question of group theory amd measure theory.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

A real-world problem

Posted on 25/04/2026 by Peter Cameron

Imagine you are in the following situation.

You are the foreign minister of your country. You are in New York for a meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations.

A powerful enemy has been deploying troops on the borders of your country. The “experts” say that there are no plans to invade you, this is just to put pressure on you (invasion would be contrary to the United Nations charter), but if they did invade, your country would last only a few days.

But you know, or suspect, that the enemy leader’s goal is that your country will cease to exist, and that its land, people, resources and culture will become part of his empire. Also, he will have no qualms about spilling his people’s blood to achieve this.

The day before you are due to address the General Assembly, US intelligence tells you that the invasion will occur within the next 48 hours.

You know that words can matter, and that if you do not choose the right words, the consequences will be the deaths of some of your citizens (both soldiers and civilians) and possibly the disappearance of your country. It is very important that when you speak to the delegates of thhe 193 nations on earth, you persuade them not to turn away but to engage.

What do you say?

If you want to know what the Foreign Minister actually said, you should get hold of a copy of the new book Words of Defiance by Bjorn Berge, published by Biteback Publishing of London.

On second thoughts, I will repeat that sentence without the conditional.

You should get hold of a copy of the new book Words of Defiance by Bjorn Berge, published by Biteback Publishing of London.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Deep isoclinism

Posted on 21/04/2026 by Peter Cameron

Graphs and groups, in my view, are two subjects engaged in a wide-ranging dialogue at present. Graphs can be used to describe interesting classes of groups, and groups to construct interesting graphs.

But I am delighted that recently, in a paper published last year in the International Journal of Group Theory, a new concept in group theory has come up, based on a paper on a particular graph defined on groups, the so-called “deep commuting graph”.

The deep commuting graph saw the light in my paper with Bojan Kuzma in the Journal of Graph Theory. Two vertices are joined if their inverse images in any central extension of the group commute. (A central extension of G is a group H with a central subgroup Z such that H/Z is isomorphic to G.) The deep commuting graph is contained in the commuting graph (as a spanning subgraph) and contains the enhanced power graph.

Central to its study is the notion of isoclinism of groups, invented by Philip Hall. Two groups are isoclinic if their commutator structures are isomorphic, in a certain sense. Commutation, the map taking (x,y) to x−1y−1xy, is a map from G×G to G. But multiplying its arguments by central elements doesn’t change the value, and it maps into the derived subgroup G‘ generated by all commutators. So it can be thought of as a map from (G/Z(G))2 to G‘. Then an isoclinism from G to H is a pair of isomorphisms from G/Z(G) to H/Z(H) and from G‘ to H‘ which “intertwine” the commutation maps in the obvious way.

For example, the dihedral and quaternion groups of order 8 are isoclinic. The central quotients are the Klein group of order 4, and the derived groups the cyclic group of order 2.

As an exercise, show that isoclinic groups of the same order have isomorphic commuting graphs. (The commuting graph is a sort of “kernel” of the commutation map.)

Bojan and I found that many rather esoteric parts of group theory get involved in the study: the Schur and Bogomolov multipliers, Schur covers, and so on.

Anyway, to the business in hand: Bahram Arvin, Behrouz Edalatzadeh and Ali Reza Salemkar introduce a new concept, which they call “deep isoclinism”. Roughly speaking, it bears the same relation to the deep commuting graph as isoclinism does to the commuting graph.

Two groups are deeply isoclinic if they have Schur covers which are isoclinic. Facts about Schur covers demonstrate that this notion is independent of the choice of Schur covers in the definition. (Similarly, the definition of the deep commuting graph can be simplified: it is the projection of the commuting graph in a Schur cover, and again the definition is independent of the choice of Schur cover.)

The notion differs curiously from ordinary isoclinism in being much more stringent. Two abelian groups of the same order are deep isoclinic if and only if they are isomorphic. Also, a group is deep isoclinic to the trivial group if and only if it is cyclic. Isoclinism and deep isoclinism coincide for a pair of groups if and only if the Bogomolov multiplier of each is equal to its Schur multiplier.

Just as isoclinic groups of the same order have isomorphic commuting graphs, so deep isoclinic groups of the same order have isomorphic deep commuting graphs. The converse of the first assertion is false (examples of order 64 were found by Eamonn O’Brien), but for the second assertion it is not known if it holds or not.

It also gave me great pleasure that the International Journal of Group Theory is back on-line, though of course we don’t know whether this will continue, given the state of the war. Check it out at ijgt.ui.ac.ir. Check it out: it is diamond open access, you can read everything!

Posted in exposition | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment