Category Archives: mathematics and …

how our discipline relates to other things

An organ recital

Posted on 11/02/2013 by

Last week, the refurbished organ in the Great Hall of the People’s Palace at Queen Mary was officially inaugurated. Along with the Purcell, Bach, Handel, Wesley, Ketelby, Coates, and so on, was a piece by my colleague and co-author Donald … Continue reading →

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Strange Attractors

Posted on 30/10/2012 by

Barry Mazur wrote a book Imagining numbers:(particularly the square root of minus fifteen), which was intended to convey to non-mathematicians that the act of imagination in mathematics is quite comparable to that in poetry. Specifically, he wants to explain how … Continue reading →

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Necessity

Posted on 02/09/2012 by

While reading Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, in Chapter 25 of Book 8, I came upon this striking sentence: Ye shall want no thing that you behoveth My first parsing of it was wrong. When it was written, the nominative … Continue reading →

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Circles disturbed

Posted on 19/07/2012 by

My review of the book Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative has just appeared in the on-line version of the London Mathematical Society’s Newsletter, which can be found here. I do intend to return to this and say … Continue reading →

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Raymond Brownell’s exhibition

Posted on 20/02/2012 by

Raymond Brownell is one of a select group of artists whose work is informed by mathematics. Raymond was born in Tasmania, and worked as an architect, having been involved with the Sydney Opera House. He now lives in Sussex and … Continue reading →

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Overheard

Posted on 10/11/2011 by

On the Piccadilly line this morning, one side of a phone conversation: You know square and cube? The band’s called Cubed because it’s the power of me, the power of you, the power of us, that’s the third power, so … Continue reading →

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Lex poems

Posted on 05/11/2011 by

Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, “poetry = the best words in the best order”. Now lexicographers believe they know the best order for words, to put them in their dictionaries. So one could consider a lex poem to be one where … Continue reading →

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When I walk into the room

Posted on 13/10/2011 by

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that too few women reach the level of permanent academic appointments in mathematics. What is not agreed is what should be done about it. Some think that we should have some form of affirmative … Continue reading →

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Impact factor engineering

Posted on 17/07/2011 by

Goodhart’s law asserts: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. This simple and obvious truth, it seems to me, is at the basis of much of the present crisis in evaluation of teaching (both … Continue reading →

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Tessellating in the rain

Posted on 13/06/2011 by

On the left, the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland: a periodic tessellation of the plane by hexagons (with some imperfections), made of basalt. On the right, the Mathematics building at Queen Mary, University of London: a non-periodic Penrose tiling, made of … Continue reading →

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