Occasionally I have this urge to play around with mathematics again.  Usually it's nothing too hard as it's over 35 years since I did mathematics seriously.  One thing I've been fooling around with is the representation of the roots of x^n-1=0 on the unit circle in the complex plane.  This is is one of those lovely bits of mathematics which is both ( Read more... )

Just learned that one of my favourite university teachers died last year. Julian Besag was quite peculiar, even by the standards of academic mathematicians, but I loved the two courses I took with him. His 3H Stochastic Processes course was considered to be exceptionally demanding and in my year only six students took it. It was far and away my ( Read more... )

This amused me as one of the odder pieces of mathematical formalism I've ever seen.


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I suspect this post won't be nearly as coherent as I would like but it's an attempt to get some of my thoughts about current developments in physics down in writing. It may also come off as more cynical than I intend ( Read more... )

Despite reading mathematics at university many moons ago, I never formally studied quantum mechanics or relativity. This was because I was much stronger in the general areas of probability theory and statistics than in physical methods so I chose my options accordingly. I still try and catch up with what's going on in the world of theoretical ( Read more... )