Tom Briggs

You're reading: Posts By Tom Briggs

Talking Maths in… Coventry Transport Museum

By Tom Briggs. Posted May 28, 2026

The sleek, black Thrust SSC land-speed record-holder stretches across a museum gallery, its needle-like nose tapering to a sharp silver point while two enormous jet engine intakes loom behind the cockpit like giant circular tunnels. The machine’s glossy body is decorated with racing logos, thin red-white-green stripes, and a small Union Flag near the front, emphasising its British engineering heritage. Low barriers and information plaques surround the exhibit, while the dramatic proportions - extremely long, low, and narrow - make the car look more like an aircraft fuselage or missile than a conventional car, hinting at the extraordinary speeds it was built to achieve.

This is a guest post from museum educator and mathematician Tom Briggs, about his session at last August’s Talking Maths in Public conference.

2025’s Talking Maths in Public (TMiP) conference took place on the Warwick University campus, but the Saturday morning networking and wind-down venue was the fabulous Coventry Transport Museum. A few weeks earlier I’d been asked by the TMiP organising committee if I’d like to offer something related to my work with museums, and I think it’s about time I wrote something about what happened.

Review: The Pseudorandom Ensemble at TMiP25

By Tom Briggs. Posted September 3, 2025

The number one component of music that really gets my attention is Brian May plays guitar, but a very close second is clever lyrics. The first morning of 2025’s Talking Maths in Public (TMiP) conference, from waking up, through carving myself a slice of scrambled egg at the breakfast buffet, up until the blessed relief of Jon Chase’s fabulous keynote talk, was soundtracked by a repeating refrain that only I could hear:

‘I like the Pope / The Pope’s got notes on polytopes’.

What does DALL·E ‘think’ mathematics and a mathematician looks like?

By Tom Briggs. Posted August 10, 2022

DALL·E is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system that has been designed to generate new images given a text prompt. It’s very much like doing a Google image search with one very important difference: DALL·E doesn’t try to find existing images to match your query, but creates a handful of new ones that it hopes will fit the bill.