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.

Well, my planned launch for yesterday (Thursday) of How to Think Like a Mathematician videos didn’t quite work out. On Wednesday night I had the first video prepared and uploaded to YouTube all ready to go. My wife sat down with me to watch it. On the first slide she noticed a particularly bad typo, one which rather annoyingly I had noticed the day before but had forgotten to alter. So I had to go back to the video, correct the error and save the movie again. For reasons I don’t understand the saving took over an hour. On Thursday morning I uploaded the video to YouTube. This takes quite a while, first to upload and then it has to be processed. This took hours because the video is in high definition. And guess what, the quality was not high definition. I only got the “Watch in Higher Quality” option from YouTube not the “Watch in High Definition”.

So throughout the day I tried different settings on my Mac to produce a video of the same quality as my original but could not do so until after 6pm. Therefore I abandoned my video launch even though I have a good quality version. The problem now is that the video does not play through smoothly the first time it is played. A user has to let the whole video load and then watch it. I’m looking for a way round this.

My intention is to launch on Thursday 26th March. I’ll be in Valencia giving a talk that day so it seems fitting.

I have been working on my videos to accompany How to Think Like a Mathematician. My first one is more of a demo, I used it as practice. The subject is what happens to a deck of playing cards when it is given eight perfect shuffles. You can see it on YouTube at:

Comments are of course welcome!