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The Laws of Gelada (How to be a grad student)
Irving Herman‘s Laws for graduates can make good little scientists. How can we make misbehaved big scientists?1 The original Herman rules have Hx numbers my versions are down under Gx. H1. Your...
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Building Mathematics: The Maker Faire in Pictures
[Update 18/3/10 The student from my Communicating Maths course who helped out with the stall over the weekend has put his story up on the course's blog: Maths Students Read the Newspaper .] Last...
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My dream Royal Institution
Edit 24/1/13The RI crisis returns with the recent announcement that the buildings might have to be sold. Some are calling for clear statements of visions for the future, so I believe that this piece is...
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Icosahedral Tiling Model
Following on from the “How do shapes fill space?” exhibit at the RSSE last year, the Science Museum accepted our offer of some of the zometool models. There were three classics, the 120-cell, 600-cell...
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Mathematics is vital!
[This is a painful post to write and probably to read, I attempt to soften the blow by including some geometric construction projects I have been working on!] I write this as a UK mathematician...
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Imagine you will talk to monkeys…
We have all sat in lectures, looking around to wonder if anyone is still able to follow. In writing a talk it is often hard to judge the right standard, and in general we make the lecture harder than...
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I find myself looking for a job…
I have a weird collection of skills. Mathematics, talking about mathematics, art, making… I am certainly missing opportunities, maybe because few know the skill set even exists! So its time to...
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In memorium: Foyle’s Mathematics room.
For years the mathematics books at Foyles bookshop in London had their own room. It was a strange place, to the uninitiated inexplicably yellow. It had its own quirks rules and legends. There were...
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Will the next generation act?
Mathematics and policy need to meet in preschool [A recent collaboration with Vinay Gupta, available as a pdf] We are all products of our environment, so education is one of our best chances of...
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Word powers of ten
How do we understand the number of words on the internet? Its hard to even grasp how many there are, and the number is growing so rapidly. Trying to understand a similar problem, the size of the...
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Being wrong
I hate being wrong, ask anyone in my family, they will get that slightly weary look and agree (and I am not the only one). I have tried to counter this by learning and improving my knowledge, which...
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The future we deserve
Telling the future is impossible, yet we have to do it every day. We need to be realistic at the same time as allowing some hope, as not trying for better things is one of the best ways to ensure that...
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The 2×1 rectangle and Domes
Next week I am going to be at the Gathering for Gardner, an exciting meeting of mathematicians, magicians, puzzlers and others inspired by the life and work of Martin Gardner. This post is a version of...
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Old models of education
This is a post for the Edgeryders conference that I will be visiting in a little over a week. It is also available on that site. We have many problems in education, and too often the response is to...
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Education Depression
Mathematics education is hard, in part because the skills it takes to understand mathematics and to teach mathematics are actually quite different. In addition, once grasped, many mathematical ideas...
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Five principles of the evil teaching guru
When you apply for a university job you include a “teaching philosophy”, depending on institution this can be ignored or taken seriously. I have a teaching philosophy. Though I am not sure I would ever...
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Mathematics out loud
We are used to reading mathematics, we are also used to hearing it spoken in lectures. I can think of few examples of the natural way to combine these. Why do we never read mathematics out loud?...
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The TMC Logo
Collegiate typography parsed into a fractal, with the theme of lots of parts coming together to make the whole. That’s the corporate design spin on the new logo for the Twitter Math Camp, but for an...
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Data Visualisation, from the World Cup to Drugs in Arkansas
This summer I taught a graduate statistics course in data visualisation at the University of Arkansas. As a final project the students had to find a data set, think of questions you could ask of it and...
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Snowflake, Seashell, Star
Alex and I initially met thanks to this blog. He was fact checking for an article that included the Taylor-Socolar aperiodic tiling that I had written up. The general theme of the article was the...
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