Before this magnificent website existed, I published four editions of what was then known as The Internet Maths Aperiodical at Samuel Hansen’s site ACME Science.
You can find those earlier works in their own category at ACME Science.
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- An update on the society, now registered to James Lighthill’s rooms at Imperial College, including notice of appointment of “the first permanent officer of the Institute”, Mr. Norman Clarke, who left the Institute of Physics and The Physical Society for appointment, and notice of the first AGM on Wednesday, 29 September 1965.
- Notice of a residential conference on “The State of the Art in Numerical Analysis” at Birmingham University in July.
- Notice of a symposium on “How to Teach the Art of Approximation” at Imperial College, London in May and repeated at University of Strathclyde in July.
- Notice of various “Lecture Meetings” in London, Manchester, the West Midlands, Bristol and Leeds, with the expressed hope of further meetings in Liverpool, Newcastle and Southampton. These were to “try to appeal to a wide range of membership and not be highly specialized”, with topics including wave propagation, satellite orbits, electrical manufacturing, OR, meteorology, blood flow and Christopher Zeeman’s “A Mathematical Model of the Brain”. A note records that “at some of the above centres it seems likely that local branches of the Institute will develop”, with the first Branch proposal coming from Manchester and a Scottish committee being formed “to cater for interests in Scotland”.
- Notice of a proposal for running examinations towards a H.N.C. in Mathematics.
- An article detailing “The Origins of the Institute”.
- A full list of members as of 1st January 1965, comprising 416 Fellows, 195 Associate Fellows, 42 Companion Members, 84 Graduate Members and 7 Student Members.
MathsJam Manchester, February 2012
This is a roundup of things which happened at Manchester MathsJam, February 2012.
First, we discuss a puzzle I found on Futility Closet, a blog of curiosities by Greg Ross which is sometimes mathematical. The Martian Census Bureau compiled the marital history of every male and female Martian, living and dead: Never married: 6,823,041; Married once: 7,354,016; Married twice: 1,600,897; Married three times: 171,013; Married four times: 2,682. What’s wrong with these figures?
Neil deGrasse Tyson: Culturally an academic
I listened to Samuel Hansen’s interview with local-boy-made-good Neil deGrasse Tyson (that’s an in joke for those who have listened, so you’d better go and listen, right?).
They speak about mathematics in astrophysics (“math in astrophysic”?), space exploration & research, outreach and more.
In talking mathematics, Dr Tyson covers an unplanned impact of mathematics and also offers this gem:
You visit China you want to speak Chinese so you can communicate with the culture. If you want to talk to the Universe you have to know mathematics.
Perhaps the most interesting part of their conversation, to me, is the discussion of outreach and helping children develop and grow their natural enthusiasm and curiosity into a career in science. Dr Tyson also engagingly makes the case for fundamental research and investment in science research in economic terms, including the role of scientists in communicating their work to the public.
The interview was a really interesting and engaging eighteen minutes of audio. I am grateful that Dr Tyson and others are willing to give a little time to this sort of activity, and once again grateful that Samuel somehow manages to eke out a living, for the moment, while producing this sort of content. If you have it in your power to somehow help him to keep doing this, please do so (possibilities range from offering him somewhere to sleep in LA later this month to offering Samuel a job which makes the most of his talents).
One part of the interview that really resonated with me was when Samuel asked about Dr Tyson moving away from more traditional academic work towards what I would call outreach – writing books and broadcasting – and administration – directing the Hayden Planetarium – while still calling himself an academic. In his answer Dr Tyson describes himself as “culturally an academic”.
People often ask what I do and its quite hard for some people to understand because I’m not easily pigeonholed. This was brought home this week when I gave my history of cryptography lecture at Salford and my host presented the awkward question, “how should I introduce you?”
Technically I have an administrator employment contract and part of my job is administering funding and collecting and collating reports, yet I see my primary interest as teaching mathematics at university and my work as doing or developing research into improving that teaching. Although I am not an academic in the sense of doing mathematical research and being employed on an academic contract, my research is into teaching and I engage in academic-like activities like teaching, outreach, attending conferences and active membership of professional bodies and learned societies. I see my future as being a mathematics lecturer whose research is into improving his teaching. I like the notation of seeing myself as “culturally an academic”.
IMA Bulletin Volume 1, Issue 1
IMA members receive, as part of their subscription, copies of Mathematics Today. The original IMA members’ magazine was the IMA Bulletin, first published in 1965 following the founding of the institute in 1964. In 1996 the Bulletin re-branded as Mathematics Today, though kept the numbering system, so the most recent issue I received is volume 48, issue 1 for February 2012.
This week, on a trip to Salford for workshops run by our supported projects, I was lucky enough to spend a little time with a complete set of issues of IMA Bulletin/Mathematics Today. Here is a picture of volume 1, issue 1. A far cry from the latest Mathematics Today!
Edited by E.T. Goodwin of National Physical Laboratory and J. Howlett of the Atlas Computer Laboratory, serving under founding President Prof. M.J. Lighthill, no contents are listed but the issue contains:
A Noether Theorem for Markov Processes
• Puzzle 1. Suppose I have a box of jewels. The average value of a jewel in the box is \$10. I randomly pull one out of the box. What’s the probability that its value is at least \$100?
• Puzzle 2. Suppose I have a box full of numbers—they can be arbitrary real numbers. Their average is zero, and their standard deviation is 10. I randomly pull one out. What’s the probability that it’s at least 100?
John Baez and Brendan Fong claim to have answered questions like these, but in a general way that is useful for quantum mechanics:
Perspectives of the regular solid
BibliOdyssey has posted some very old perspective drawings of polyhedra and other geometric shapes.
London Day Trip Stop 3: British Museum
Thinking I was being too obvious, particularly having just told Twitter I was in Russell Square, I tweeted a photo of the base of a pillar as a clue to my next location.
I hadn’t intended this to be a stop on my trip as I’ve been before but, having had lunch by the fountain in Russell Square Gardens, I couldn’t resist a few minutes inside the British Museum.
I made my way to the Enlightenment Gallery. I enjoy this room, which usually seems calm (relative to the bustling Egyptian galleries opposite) and is full of interesting small pieces including scientific instruments. I hadn’t realised but I had just missed the “eye–opener gallery tour” (Free; Daily, 12.30; for 30–40 minutes).
Having seen the King’s Library in the British Library earlier that morning, I was interested to read that this room was the previous location of the same library. Apparently its donation caused a building programme to expand the British Museum and this room was built in 1827 specifically to house the new library.
After the King’s Library was moved to the British Library in 1997, a restoration of the gallery in 2000-3 “revived the original room to its previous glory of the 1820s”:
Repairs to the oak and mahogany floor and classical architectural features have refreshed the space. Hundreds of square metres of plaster were cleaned to restore the yellow and gold ornamentation and the re-gilded balcony.
Two hundred kilometres of wiring (twice round the M25 motorway) enabled a subtle lighting system to be installed, which aims to complement the newly-restored colour scheme.
The result was that two centuries of use and London grime were washed away and a major permanent exhibition, using thousands of objects from the Museum collection to show how people understood their world in the Age of Enlightenment, was created.
To my surprise, no one had yet guessed my location! I tweeted a second clue, a row of postcards of the Rosetta Stone on sale in the museum shop, and Courtney Williams was quick to guess my location. Showing considerable wisdom, she tweeted:
I’d ask if I won a prize, but it was enough of a prize to take part
I said that was fortunate!
On my way out of the museum I popped my head around the corner to the Rosetta Stone.
The story of this stone is fairly famous and often, in my experience, mentioned in talks on cryptography.
After the stone was rediscovered in 1799 by Napoleon’s soldiers near the town of el-Rashid (Rosetta). The stone passed to British hands in the Treaty of Alexandria (1801), being exhibited in the British Museum since 1802 (apart from briefly moving to a safe location during wartime). The Enlightenment Gallery houses a replica of the stone positioned as originally displayed.
The stone carries a decree, crucially:
inscribed on the stone three times, in hieroglyphic (suitable for a priestly decree), demotic (the native script used for daily purposes), and Greek (the language of the administration).
The repetition of the same text in three languages was important to modern understanding of hieroglyphs, and through them our understanding of ancient Egyptian culture.
Thomas Young, an English physicist, was the first to show that some of the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone wrote the sounds of a royal name, that of Ptolemy. The French scholar Jean-François Champollion then realized that hieroglyphs recorded the sound of the Egyptian language.
After my short but enjoyable visit to the museum, I moved on to my next location, which I will save for a later post.