Personal

The shape of equations and the texture of maths

Working with them every day, equations become almost tactile. Some are as sharp as flints, others as edgeless as a beach pebble worn by waves and sand. In particular, the deepest relationships in nature are often expressed by equations which, at least typographically, are disarmingly smooth.

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The Writing Life: An Update on the Blog

I have been writing this blog for over ten years. I am not particularly prolific; there are around 100 posts…

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Keep Looking Up

I chalked up a personal first yesterday; I saw an aurora with my own eyes and it was every bit…

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A Bigger Sky

Amongst everything else that happened in 2023 a key anniversary for a landmark in our understanding of the Universe passed largely unnoticed – the centenary of the realisation that not only was our Sun one of many stars in the Milky Way galaxy but that our galaxy was one of many galaxies in the Universe.

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A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

There is insight in the stories that numbers can tell, and for some of us that insight offers a sense of calm in turbulent times. Which may be why In the midst of this year’s rains I started making graphs of the accumulated rainfall and how it stacked up against previous years.

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X Marks The Spot

For now I am taking heart from an adage from Usenet days; that the internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it – new social media sites are popping up aiming to catch the flavour of the old Twitter while perhaps avoiding some of its weaknesses.

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