It wasn’t all bad

The charity Art UK has announced the completion of an ambitious project to catalogue the UK’s thousands of public sculptures. Some 500 volunteers across the country went out in search of works, ranging from two statues of herring girls in Stornoway, to a 15ft sculpture of a spoon in a field in Northumberland. More than 13,500 were logged in total, including some 30 Barbara Hepworths and 70 Henry Moores. The charity next hopes to list all the UK’s public murals.

A giant waterlily that has been growing in a pond at Kew Gardens for 177 years has been identified as a species previously unknown to science. Victoria boliviana is only the third known species of giant waterlily, as well as the largest, with pads up to 3.2m wide. Scientists at Kew had long suspected a third species of giant waterlily was out there, and worked with researchers in the plant’s native home of Bolivia to test their hypothesis that it was lurking in one of their own conservatories. Carlos Magdalena, who co-authored a paper on the discovery, described it as the “highlight” of his career.

A Ukrainian woman has been named as one of the four winners of the Fields Medal, a prize awarded every four years to outstanding mathematicians under the age of 40. Maryna Viazovska, who is only the second female recipient of the prestigious award, won it for proving the best way to pack spheres in eight dimensions. “Sphere packing is a very natural geometric problem,” she explained. “You have a big box, and you have an infinite collection of equal balls, and you’re trying to put as many balls into the box as you can.”