So we're cataloguing our books on LibraryThing. It's hard deciding how to tag fiction: what you want when looking for something to read are the abstractions of the QI bookshop. What we settle for is setting, which is easy to pin down but not, perhaps, what the book is aboutOne set I do collect for the setting is novels featuring mathematicians. ( Read more... )

Before Tuesday's reliably excellent gig by the Free French, I was at the British Library for a lecture promoting Mathematics With Love: The Courtship Correspondence of Barnes Wallis, Inventor of the Bouncing Bomb. Wallis had been permitted to write to his cousin Molly by her father on condition that he teach her the mathematics needed for her ( Read more... )

Ten years ago this month I went to Oxford as a callow fresher. Oxford is about college spirit, or something, but I found a welcome in the Invariant Society - mathematicians so keen on lectures they arrange their own for Tuesday nights. High-mindedly, I think the question is not why you'd treat maths as a recreation, but why waste money at ( Read more... )

daweaver asks: 'Should one make the best of the hand one's been dealt, or should one be prepared to discard cards to maximise the value of the hand?'

Calculation is called 'cold' only by people who prefer to be Wrong (but Wromantic). In conversation on Saturday, helenbr reminded me that one can derive a rule of thumb for choosing the best candidate, whether for ( Read more... )

Number 11 in The Worst Jobs in Science is 'metric system advocate'. That sounds like a challenge.

It's not funny, though; it's slightly crap. Metrication was announced to Parliament in 1965. Four decades on and we still have A Very British Mess. [Disclosure: I helped develop that site.]

Who benefits from consumer confusion? Who benefits from ( Read more... )