Author Archives: Peter Cameron

About Peter Cameron

I count all the things that need to be counted.

Normal

Posted on 14/11/2018

There are various overused terms in mathematics. “Normal” is one of them. Perhaps the four commonest uses are the following: A complex square matrix is normal if it commutes with its conjugate transpose. Normal matrices are precisely the ones which … Continue reading →

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Old Codger’s Combinatorics Conference

Posted on 09/11/2018

Wednesday was the Old Codger’s Combinatorics Conference at the University of Reading, a one-day meeting organised by Anthony Hilton. The position of the apostrophe is correct: it refers to the fact that Anthony admits that he is an old codger … Continue reading →

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Synchronization update

Posted on 30/10/2018

There is some recent news about the synchronization project. Two steps forward have occurred. The set-up Here is a brief recapitulation. Let G be a transitive permutation group on Ω, where |Ω| = n. We say that G is non-synchronizing if there … Continue reading →

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A mathematical promenade

Posted on 20/10/2018

I haven’t posted for a while; I have been in China where the firewall allows me to read WordPress but not to post. Normal service now resumed (hopefully). Given four real polynomials, all of which vanish at the origin, suppose … Continue reading →

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Dugald Macpherson’s birthday meeting

Posted on 27/09/2018

Still catching up on the backlog: last week I was in Edinburgh for a meeting at ICMS for Dugald Macpherson’s birthday. The ICMS has just moved to new premises at the top of the University of Edinburgh’s new Bayes Centre, … Continue reading →

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8th Cracow Conference on Graph Theory

Posted on 19/09/2018

How do two people share a cake? As everyone knows, one cuts and the other chooses. This does not assume that the two people value the cake in the same ways: maybe one loves cherries, and the other hates icing. … Continue reading →

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Groups, geometries and representations

Posted on 16/09/2018

Here, more than a week late, are comments on the conference formally titled “Groups, Geometries and Representations, Oxford 2018”, actually a birthday conference for Dan Segal and Aner Shalev. I stayed in Balliol College’s new Jowett Walk Building, just around … Continue reading →

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