These are the show notes for episode 10 of the Travels in a Mathematical World Podcast. 10 is both a Triangular number and a Tetrahedral number. More about the number 10 from thesaurus.maths.org.

Following on from last week, this week on the podcast is the second of two installments from Dr Adrian Bowyer, who talks through some of the areas his career has taken him into. You can find out more about Adrian from his homepage at the University of Bath, and Adrian has a Wikipedia page.

This week, Adrian talks about his work mimicking biological adaptions in engineering. He talks about his work on the self-replicating machine, RepRap and there is a wealth of information on that website.

While Adrian is speaking I am fascinated by a pile of objects made through a commerical rapid prototyping machine which are sitting on a table in Adrian’s office. These are pictured below along with a picture of a RepRap machine and Adrian.

I would very much recommend watching the video on YouTube of “Building RepRap 1.0 ‘Darwin'”, which shows in fast forward Adrian assembling a RepRap machine. This is at times both fascinating and hilarious, particularly the tea break in the middle and the guy who completely grasps the possibility for humour in the different frames of reference of the situation.

For the latest from the RepRap project, read the blog.