Category Archives: mathematics

Finite geometry and probabilistic combinatorics

Posted on 05/05/2013 by

In the late 1960s, when I was born as a mathematician, I worked on finite permutation groups, on the edge of finite geometry and the combinatorics of very regular structures. I was dimly aware that there was a completely different … Continue reading →

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Random synchronization

Posted on 24/04/2013 by

Mikhail Berlinkov posted a paper on the arXiv this week proving that two random transformations of an n-set generate a synchronizing semigroup with probability 1-o(1/n) for large n. His approach was quite different from the one I’d been taking, using … Continue reading →

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Fear of mathematics, 2

Posted on 10/04/2013 by

“Letter to my younger self” is a regular feature of the Big Issue, but apparently it is more widely distributed. My new colleague Richard Cormack circulated to the department a link to a rant by the Australian statistician Ron Sandland, … Continue reading →

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Abelian groups

Posted on 22/02/2013 by

This post is inspired by a very nice paper by Henrik Kragh Sørensen in the current issue of the Bulletin of the British Society for the History of Mathematics, entitled “What’s Abelian about abelian groups?” Abel worked and died long … Continue reading →

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History

Posted on 04/12/2012 by

Ten years ago, Queen Mary had a study programme in Discrete Mathematics. We were one of the first universities in Britain to do this, and I believe they invented a special UCAS code for the course. The study programme was … Continue reading →

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Homomorphisms modulo a prime

Posted on 03/12/2012 by

Two of my colleagues have been doing interesting things with counting homomorphisms modulo a prime; Thomas Müller with group homomorphisms, and Mark Jerrum with graph homomorphisms. I may get round to discussing Thomas’s work later. Here I want to discuss … Continue reading →

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Permutation groups and regular semigroups, 2

Posted on 06/04/2012 by

João Araújo and I have been working together this week, and the paper, which I discussed here, is nearly ready to submit, after we managed a couple of quite significant improvements. I’d like to draw attention to a couple of … Continue reading →

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Boris Weisfeiler

Posted on 22/03/2012 by

This is an extraordinary story which I learned about only last week. In the 1960s, while Donald Higman in the USA was developing the theory of coherent configurations, Boris Weisfeiler was introducing the equivalent notion of cellular algebras in the … Continue reading →

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Mathematics today

Posted on 17/01/2012 by

A recent “Science in Parliament” meeting resulted in a lovely article by Ken Brown and Paul Glendinning, entitled Mathematics Today, on the current state of UK mathematics. They do not shrink from discussing conflicts between the EPSRC-commissioned International Review of … Continue reading →

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The probability of conjugacy

Posted on 15/01/2012 by

Last week John Britnell spoke in the London Algebra Colloquium. He talked about joint work with Simon Blackburn and Mark Wildon (the preprint is here), and remarked that since they are both at Royal Holloway and he is in Bristol, … Continue reading →

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