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London Day Trip Stop 2: Russell Square
Having visited the British Library on stop 1, I bought a sandwich for lunch and walked down to Russell Square.
The clue I tweeted to my location (below) was nicely ambiguous, looking like a fairly standard London scene. David Ault, winner of the photo clue competition at stop 1, attempted a “CSI ‘Zoom… Enhance…’” on the phone boxes but failed.
A page on the Camden Council website gives a timeline of history of the Russell Square. The origins are in 1545 when the first Earl of Southampton purchased the manor of Bloomsbury from the Crown, and particularly in 1669 when the Russell family acquired the Estate. A period of building in the late 18th and early 19th centuries led to the laying out of a garden in Russell Square in 1806.
Russell square is described in ‘Russell Square and Bedford Square‘ (Old and New London: Volume 4 by Edward Walford) in 1878:
A writer in the St. James’s Magazine thus speaks of this locality: “Russell Square is, under ordinary circumstances, a very nice place to walk in. If those troublesome railway vans and goods wagons would not come lumbering and clattering, by way of Southampton Row, through the square, and up Guilford Street, on their way to King’s Cross, ‘La Place Roussell’ would be as cosy and tranquil as ‘La Place Royale’ in Paris. It has the vastness of Lincoln’s Inn Fields without its dinginess.”
It was in these gardens that I sat for my lunch, by a fountain that was added in a re-landscaping in 2000-1, “loosely based” on the original layout. I visit Russell Square often, though not often the gardens, as it is the location of De Morgan House, headquarters of the London Mathematical Society (LMS). The photo below shows a view from the fountain towards De Morgan House.
According to a brief history given on the LMS website, the formation of the society took place in a fashion of founding new “specialised scientific outlets” in the 19th century, including societies for geology (1807), astronomy (1820), statistics (1834) and chemistry (1841). Originally associated with University College London (incidentally, on the other side of Russell Square), the LMS held its first meeting at University College on Monday January 16th 1865 with Augustus De Morgan, the founding professor of mathematics at University College, as its first President giving the opening address. The idea for the society came from De Morgan’s son, George Campbell De Morgan, and Arthur Cowper Ranyard, both former students at University College, who felt “it would be very nice to have a Society to which all discoveries in Mathematics could be brought, and where things could be discussed, like the Astronomical [Society]”.
Having operated from offices in various locations, the Society located in (and renamed) De Morgan House in 1998. The building now holds a conference venue and a room used by the IMA for meetings, one or other of which is where I tend to be going when I visit Russell Square on ordinary days.
The square is also the home of the Russell Hotel. This is a significant location because the hotel gives its name to the Russell Group of 20 universities which, according to its website, are “committed to maintaining the very best research, an outstanding teaching and learning experience and unrivalled links with business and the public sector”. The Russell Group was founded and originally met in the hotel.
Having finished my lunch, I moved on. I will save my next stop for another post.
The months are drawing in
February was two days shorter than January. “I’m worried”, I tweeted, “If this carries on, how long will December 2012 be?”
Another way of looking at this is that February is about 93.5% the length of January, so I asked which would produce a shorter December:
A. losing a fixed 2 days each month; or,
B. each month being 93.5% of the previous.
It’s possible, of course, to simply calculate the answer. However, it is possible to come to an answer as to which is shorter without recourse to such a messy technique.
Under B, we know 93.5% of January is two days, the amount by which February is shorter. If March is 93.5% of February we know this decrease must be less than two days because February was shorter than January. And so on. The decrease in A is always 2 days, but the decrease in B is 2 days in the first month and less for later months. Since the overall decrease has been greater, A gives a shorter December.
I suppose there’s a niggle that we don’t usually allow fractions of days on the calendar, so if you’re going to be all ‘real world’ about it then each month should be rounded and this rounding will occur before the 93.5% is calculated to form the next month. So I suppose we will have to do a messy calculation after all.
Under A, losing 2 days per month for 11 months is 22 days, so December will be 9 days long.
Under B, taking each month to be 93.5% of the previous, and then rounding to the nearest integer in the normal way, I get a sequence for the number of days for each month: 31, 29, 27, 25, 23, 22, 21, 20, 19, 18, 17, 16.
So my December is a full seven days shorter by the ‘fixed two days’ method.
Did you get 14 or 15 days for December? If you simply take each month to be 93.5% of the previous without rounding, you calculate 0.935^11*31 and get December as 14.8 days. You can round this to 15, or take the whole days to get 14, but this requires nonsensical things like 18.5 days in November to have happened on the way.
I feel as though this could be a nice, silly way in at various levels to either some basic arithmetic, exponential decrease, through to boundedness in geometric sequences. Even, into some discussion about translating mathematics to real world answers, as the quick 0.935^11*31 calculation masks a whole mess of unreality along the way.
London Day Trip Stop 1: British Library
In a previous blog post Things to do in London on a Tuesday I asked for suggestions of things to do on my day trip to London. I went because I was invited to attend the inaugural London walking tour from Maths in the City – we’ll get to that – and apparently the date was chosen on purpose as it was a palindrome: 21-02-2012.
On arrival in London, I idly tweeted a photo along the station platform with the caption “Looks like London”. James Clare responded to this with a guess at which station.
I was at St. Pancras. What everyone seems to notice about St. Pancras is the roof, seen in the picture below which I took on the day. This was apparently first opened in 1868 and the 243ft roof created “the largest indoor space in the world“. More recently, an £800m restoration project was completed in 2008. You can watch an interesting BBC short video about this project, featuring interviews with the chief architect, the project director and the project engineer.
Following James’ tweet, I liked the idea of a guessing game so I tweeted a clue for my new location. David Ault guessed correctly that I was at the British Library.
Outside the British Library is a statue of Newton (1995), which had been suggested to me as a destination on my day trip. Designed by Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, who said it was “intended to show how art and science are interconnected”, the statue is inspired by a 1795/circa 1805 colour print finished in ink and watercolour on paper entitled “Isaac Newton” by William Blake, which can be found in the Tate gallery.
Inside the library, I found the King’s library. Created by George III, donated to the nation in 1823 by his son George IV and once housed in the British Museum, these books are housed in an eye-catching six-storey tower (pictured below). A description of how the library was formed and its history is available on the British Library page George III Collection: the King’s Library.
I also visited the Treasures of the British Library gallery, described on the website as “a permanent free display of many of our greatest treasures”. No photographs were allowed but I took a few notes.
I saw a collection of photos and documents from the Scott polar expedition. Fresh from my Twitter photo clue competition, a note caught my eye about the use of photography to increase public interest in Scott’s expedition. The Guardian has a piece about an exhibition of photos from the expedition, which says:
In 1910 and 1911, as Scott struggled to raise funds and public support for the Terra Nova venture – media hysteria about the race to the pole was the reason the South Pole was bolted onto the scientific expedition – the explorer knew the propaganda value of superb images
Herbert Ponting (1870-1935) was hired as expedition photographer. A selection of Ponting’s photos have been uploaded to a gallery by the National Archive and one is available below.
I also saw two pages of notes by Leonardo Da Vinci from Codex Arundel. Leonardo began the collection in 1508, writing that this was “a collection without order, drawn from many papers”. The writing is mirrored Italian written from left to write. According to the British Library website pages were added from different periods in Leonardo’s life, “covering practically the whole of his career”. The website has this to say of the contents:
It includes notes for a book on the physical properties and geographical effects of water, and a broad range of other material encompassing Leonardo’s other interests in art, science and technology over a period of four decades, from the description of a prehistoric sea monster (c. 1478-80) to architectural projects for the royal residence at Romarantin in France (dating to about 1517/1518). The range of subjects – from mechanics to the flight of birds – demonstrates Leonardo’s almost compulsive intellectual curiousity about scientific and technical matters.
The pages I saw in the library were on mechanics and arithmetic. There are pages on the British Library website that show some pages from the Codex Arundel, and an introduction to the Codex.
I also saw an exhibition on early printing, many sacred texts and Magna Carta before moving onto my next stop. That, I’ll save for another post.
PRISMATICA by Kit Webster
[vimeo url=https://vimeo.com/37388088]
PRISMATICA by Kit Webster
Stereotype-abiding mathematicians of the world, unite!
Recently I wrote a post, Mathematicians are people too, about the image problem of mathematicians and called for examples of mathematicians who do not fit the traditional stereotype.
On Google+, Christian Perfect said:
ok, so, as an autistic white male mathematician, I’m going to steer clear.
I said that as a glasses-wearing, bearded white man, I didn’t feel much use either. Christian replied:
so: stereotype-abiding mathematicians band together to reassure public that mathematicians don’t necessarily conform to the stereotype.
That’s the kind of logic only mathematicians would appreciate.
I also received this comment from Twitter user @sebmr2:
Didn’t Galois do enough to break stereotypes for me to fit them?
I don’t think all mathematicians should personally break the stereotype. I remember some years ago I was working in a university mathematics department and someone had pinned up a newspaper comment piece in the staff room about how lecturers should dress in sharp suits like businessmen if they want to give the right impression to their students. I don’t agree with this.
However, my call for examples was written from another viewpoint. Not: can I, as someone who studied mathematics at university, adapt myself to avoid the stereotype. Instead: what if I was faced with a class of students, many of whom would never fit the stereotype (by virtue of their ethnicity or gender, for example)? I would want my class to believe that they too could be mathematicians, yet if they think all mathematicians conform to a certain ‘type’ then this is a barrier to them seeing themselves in this way. Particularly as it is obviously an incorrect stereotype.
So I am interested in breaking stereotypes not to change you, dear reader, but to better inspire others.
To finish, I would like to share a video suggested on Google+ by David Roberts. The video of Nalini Joshi is by Trixie Barretto, who says of it:
There’s a mathematician six floors above me where I work. I’d never had much to do with her, but I’d heard she’d had an unusual childhood in Burma, and grew up to become the first female professor of mathematics at the university where we both work. One day on Twitter she wrote, “Maths is in my heart,” a sentiment both alien and amusing to me, being someone who’s terrible with numbers. It stayed with me though, and later that afternoon I knocked on her door and asked if she’d tell me her story.
Math/Maths 87: Faulty Cables, Ridiculous Buses & Intergalactic Steroids
A new episode of the Math/Maths Podcast has been released.
A conversation about mathematics between the UK and USA from Pulse-Project.org. This week Samuel and Peter spoke about: Samuel’s ridiculous bus trip; Computer programmes with IQ 150; IBM’s Watson and data analytics; Extracting Dynamical Equations from Experimental Data is NP-Hard; OPERA faster-than-light neutrinos experiment UPDATE 23 February 2012; ‘Invisibility’ cloak could protect buildings from earthquakes; How Bots Seized Control of Carlos Bueno’s Pricing Strategy; Calculus: The Musical!; Who says ‘maths curriculum failing to meet the needs of the 21st century’?; Turing Stamp; & more, and Peter spoke to some of the team behind Maths in the City on the occasion of their inaugural London walking tour. Oh, and Samuel forgot to mention Science Sparring Society’s second fight, but the link is in the show notes anyway.
Get this episode: Math/Maths 87: Faulty Cables, Ridiculous Buses & Intergalactic Steroids