The United States government has opened an investigation into apparent efforts to impersonate White House chief of staff Susie Wiles in communications to politicians. On Friday, a White House official confirmed to The Associated Press that a probe had been opened, following a report about the impersonation in The Wall Street Journal a day prior. Anonymous sources told The Journal that governors, business leaders and senators had received messages and phone calls from someone posing as Wiles, who is a close associate of President Donald Trump. Some recipients told the newspaper that the calls even appeared to replicate Wiles's voice using artificial intelligence. The giveaway, according to The Wall Street Journal, came when the messages asked about items Wiles should know or did not sound like her in other ways.

Analysis America's largest manufacturer of body cameras – and the biggest supplier to police forces across the United States – says today's facial recognition technology is not safe for making serious decisions. Speaking during its second-quarter earnings call with investors this week, the CEO of Axon, Rick Smith, answered a question about whether the company would be adding facial-recognition systems to its suite of products and, if so, whether that would come with an additional cost. Smith responded in clear terms that current facial recognition is simply not accurate enough to "make operational decisions," ie: for police to use it to recognize individuals and use positive responses as justification for automatically and unquestioningly apprehending people. Well, the computer says you're wanted, so here come the cuffs, we can imagine a conversation with officers going. "We don't have a timeline to launch facial recognition," Smith said on the conference call (listen in at around the 40-minute mark), noting that Axon doesn't have a team "actively developing it" either.

The "rapid" growth of a police facial recognition database could lead to innocent people being unfairly targeted, a watchdog has warned. Biometrics Commissioner Paul Wiles said the Police National Database (PND) now had at least 19 million custody photographs on it. However, it is thought that hundreds of thousands of these could be of innocent people. The Home Office said police should delete images of unconvicted people. In a government review published in February, the Home Office concluded that those who are not convicted should have the right to request that their custody image is deleted from all police databases.

At the Hotel Parco dei Principi in Rome, in September of 1973, the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erd?s approached his friend Richard Guy with a request. He said, "Guy, veel you have a coffee?" It cost a dollar, a small fortune to a professor of mathematics at the hinterland University of Calgary who was not much of a coffee drinker. Yet, as Guy later recalled--during a memorial talk following Erd?s's death at age 83 two decades ago--he was curious why the great man had sought him out. Guy and Erd?s were in the Eternal City for an international colloquium on combinatorial theory, so Erd?s--who sustained himself with espresso and other stimulants, worked on math problems 19 hours a day, and in his lifetime published in excess of 1,500 papers with more than 500 collaborators--most likely had another problem on the go.

When British mathematician Sir Andrew J. Wiles was awarded the Abel Prize Laureate in math on 15 March for cracking a centuries-old hypothesis, a friend asked me, "Why did he get the prize, and will this solve any real-world problem?" Quoting from the statement that the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters gave to the press, I told him that 63-year-old Wiles had been given the annual award "for his stunning proof of (French mathematician Pierre de) Fermat's last theorem by way of the modularity conjecture for semi-stable elliptic curves, opening a new era in number theory". So let me try to simplify it a bit. Number theory--also sometimes referred to as the "queen of mathematics" or "higher arithmetic"--is a branch of pure math, devoted primarily to the study of the properties of whole numbers. Fermat--a prominent mathematician of the 17th century--contributed significantly to number theory, probability theory, analytic geometry and the early development of infinitesimal calculus. Fermat's last theorem states that no three positive integers a, b, and c satisfy the equation an bn cn for any integer value of n that is greater than two.