Grants

Have to rewrite a grant application and produce a new one too. The details of why are too complicated to get into but it does mean that this week will be very busy. Next week even more so (for different reasons). But – hopefully – the week after I will get cracking with next phase of HTTLAM: the new video. 

Also, I need to be thinking about the next book project. I have two good ideas to do with geometry. Maybe I’ll do both…

HTTLAM news

Two points of interest this week regarding How To Think Like A Mathematician – I’ve been busy running a conference so I haven’t had time to mention them.

1. Negotiations for a French translation are nearly complete. I hope I’m being too quick to advertise the fact, after all it may fall through.

2. The book has already been pirated. Someone uploaded a version to Scribd (yes, that is how they spell it). I promptly informed the website and they took it down within about six hours. They are keen to respect copyright – they say – but they are not proactive. The person who posted my book has clearly posted other copyrighted material and yet these have not been removed since Scribd say the copyright owners have to make a complaint before anything will be done. It would be a funny world if the police did nothing about an obvious crime until the victim realised and complained. Can you imagine a police officer in court – Yes m’lud, I saw the defendant steal the wallet but as the victim had not noticed I was unable to do anything about it. 

I did a search for other authors and quickly found works such as Marcus du Sautoy’s recent book (I emailed him to let him know) available in their entirety for download. It looks like I shall have to keep a close eye on the web for pirated versions of HTTLAM!

Valencia

I’m in Valencia, Spain for the first Workshop on Singularities in Generic Geometry.

So far I’ve only seen the hotel as it was night when I arrived!

HTTLAM – The Movie

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.

First video

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!

Up the Amazon

It would seem that I can’t hype my book up the Amazon charts:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/feb/23/algorithms-internet-google-amazon-itunes

Nice to see an article about mathematics in the national press though.

Book published

Long time no post! The reasons are simple. I spent a month in Brazil and upon my return to a chilly Leeds I was straight into exams. I finished the marking on Sunday and so decided to have a day off on Monday. That turned out to be a good idea as the country was snowed in!

Anyhow, my book is now published. I received sample hardback and paperback copies this morning. Last week when I checked Amazon they claimed to have only 3 copies left, yesterday it was only one, so I’ve sold at least two copies. Thank you whoever you are!

Plans for this week: Clear the backlog of emails; finish a grant proposal; organize a conference; submit final versions of accepted papers; write some PhD reports. After that (and I’m sure I left some stuff out) I’ll begin the shooting of How To Think Like a Mathematician – The Movie

Lest we forget…

An obituary for Douglas Keen of Ladybird books.

How to Think Like a Mathematician: The Movie

At the weekend I bought a Canon HG10 camcorder. I believe it’s what people in the know call ‘a lovely piece of kit’. The picture quality is fantastic and the sound is good as far I can tell – I haven’t done a proper test, although I’ve found that the operating buttons are small and fiddly.

Obviously I purchased the camcorder to record all those magical family moment with my new offspring. In addition I’ll be able to make recordings of explanations of the material in by book. How to Think Like a Mathematician: The Movie is born!

I will start by recording some thoughts on writing mathematics as that part is particularly useful for beginners. First I’ll produce a demo version to get feedback.  Stay tuned, don’t touch that dial, etc…

Bad Science Book

I’ve recently finished reading Bad Science by Ben Goldacre.  The author has been a champion of common sense and science in his column for the Guardian and his blog. The book is mostly a collection of the stories that have featured in his blog such as Gillian McKeith, MRSA, MMR, homeopathy and so will be familiar to his regular readers.

I am big fan of Goldacre’s work so I don’t want to criticize. But. And fortunately it’s not a big but. But, the book could be improved by tougher editing. There were a number of repetitions of explanation and people mentioned without explanation of who they are. A graph on media stories is labelled media stones. I’ll let that go given the problems with the pics in my book and the fact that it wasn’t as big a howler as the graph in the third part of Marcus du Sautoy’s The Story of Maths on BBC4 last week. Also the penultimate chapter claims that it is the last chapter. These should have been spotted by the author or a diligent editor. 

Right. That’s that out of the way. Despite all that it is very good book. It is highly readable and well-argued.  Also, he made a point on dumbing down right at the end which I will return to at a later time (hopefully). If you know anyone who is interested in science, particularly the science of medicine, but is not an expert, then this is for them. Arts graduates working in the media should be forced to read it!