Still haven’t finished the videos for HTTLAM. I have laryngitis so can’t do the voiceover.

Anyhow, leaving that aside, David Mitchell (curmudgeon from Peep Show) wrote an excellent attack on the the Government’s replacement for the RAE, the REF. See it at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/27/david-mitchell-pointless-studies-survey.

He makes a number of good points, I particularly liked

Research which will obviously make money if it comes off will always find private funding and so should not be prioritised for public money. In fact, it’s the very place that public money should never go – it’d be like spending the Arts Council budget on profit-making pantos instead of opera or pouring the licence fee into Quiz Call rather than BBC Four. 

The videos for HTTLAM were held up a couple of weeks ago. I was ready to start recording but the restaurant near my house had a refrigerator malfunction and so they had a refrigeration unit in their car park. The unit created sufficient noise to be detected on the sound track and so recording had to be abandoned. I hope to shoot next Monday – today my voice is too sore!

Also, corrections have appeared for the book. Only one really bad mistake so far but quite a few little annoying ones!

I’ve started producing solutions for How to Think Like a Mathematician, see my HTTLAM web page. This will be a large task and so I’ve started with the chapters that people have requested so far, i.e., the one on sets and the two chapters on induction.

I had my annual professional review recently. This is where staff in the University have a meeting with a senior colleague to discuss what they have done and where they are going. Naturally, given the success of HTTLAM I put on my review form that I would like to write another book. Perhaps not surprisingly this was the main thing my reviewer wanted deleted from my plans. The idea is that I should be getting on with my research rather than wasting time producing books. So the suggestion of a new book was crossed off the review form. 

Maybe I should quote G.H. Hardy at this point

Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds. [...] It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done. – A Mathematician’s Apology

I guess that there will be no new books for a while…

Have been away at conference in Aarhus and on holiday in Crete and have been working very hard so haven’t kept the blog up-to-date.

How to Think Like a Mathematician

 The book seems to be selling well, it regularly makes the Amazon chart of 100 best-selling mathematics books. I’ve also added a list of corrections to my webpage on the book. 

Videos

I am nearly finished the videos. I’m giving everything a thorough rewrite before shooting starts next week.

The mathematician Walter Ledermann has dies. There has been a Times obituary and a better one in the Independent.

Ledermann was very influential in my undergraduate learning. I used his book on Group Theory to learn the subject and the series of books he edited, and in some cases wrote, called the Library of Mathematics was great. Each book was a pocket-sized summary of some subject such as mathematical analysis, multiple integrals or complex analysis. The books left out a lot of the clutter and so it was possible to see what was really important in the area.

Needless to say he was influential in my writing of How to Think Like a Mathematician.

The website Bookseer allows you to enter the name and author of a book to give you a recommendation for a related book to read. Of course I entered HTTLAM and got quite a good list. 

The website just uses Amazon and LibraryThing to generate its suggestions. Unfortunately, LibraryThing gives “Nada” as a suggestion for HTTLAM.

A link to an interesting article on making science fun: 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/jun/16/science-lessons-inspiration

As part of my research into map projections I came across a blog on strange maps: http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/

I particularly liked Pogue States (to do with songs by the Pogues) and the World War II: If maps could fight (a history of WWII).

As I mentioned in the previous post I am considering a new book in geometry. I’ve recently been thinking about what got me into geometry (and mathematics) more generally. One early memory of the weird world of mathematics comes from Doctor Who. When I was about 10 my older brother borrowed the Making of Doctor Who from his school’s library. I already had a copy of the 1976 revised edition which featured Tom Baker on the cover but this was the original book from 1972. My recollection was that the original had some strange parts that were omitted in the revised edition. One of them was about geometry and how on a sphere you can make a triangle in which all three angles are 90 degrees and hence their sum is not 180 degrees as you would expect. Was my memory correct? To find out I ordered a copy from the second hand online bookstore Abebooks. And it arrived this week. I scanned the cover as you can see below.  

 I quickly flicked through the book and was surprised to find that the text was rather sparse. It wasn’t the book dense with information that I remembered. But the triangle made of right angles was there, almost exactly as I remembered, the only difference was that it does not have the right angle symbols of my memory. (If you download the scan, then you can read the actual text.)

The book contains a mixture of information about making Doctor Who and fictional reports from the program, for example the Doctor’s trial by the Time Lords. It also contains a short chapter by a reverend on God and science fiction which I have no recollection of. What I did recall correctly was that the Time Lords all had names made of mathematical symbols. These symbols had intrigued me at the age of ten. I wanted to know what they meant. I felt that there was a hidden world of mathematics out there which I wanted to find.  Unfortunately what they taught me at school was pretty much along the lines of “Here is a quadratic equation. This is how you solve it. This a simultaneous equation. This is how you solve it.”

The interesting stuff such as the triangle with three right angles was never explained.  In fact, a couple of years after I read the Making of Doctor Who I showed my science teacher the idea. I even got a small bouncy ball and drew on it with a felt tip to prove to her that it could be done. She just kept telling me that it wasn’t a triangle because it was on a sphere. She didn’t get the point that if the ball was big enough, say the size of a planet such as the Earth, then we would see the lines as straight and the angles as right angles.

Anyhow, it wasn’t until I started doing A level Mathematics that I found that hidden world of mathematics. I was amazed at the idea of differentiation. It was such a great, simple idea that I was kicking myself for not having invented it. And then we did the square root of -1! That was fantastic. Finally we were in the hidden world that I had hoped to find when I read the Making of Doctor Who at the age of ten.