End of the year…...

It’s the end of the year. It seems only like yesterday we were all saying “What? I can’t believe it’s the end of January already”. So what was the year like? I feel I’ve had a good year – I’ve been having a lot of fun trying to understand discrete surfaces and if I hadn’t succumbed to a virus just shortly before Christmas I might have written the bulk of my first paper on the subject. I also had fun with the Beatles story which garnered a lot of attention. Interestingly the most read blog entry was on the passing of Vladimir Zakalyukin. In the world of science the big story was not in mathematics but in the discovery of the Higgs boson. Given that the evidence is hardly overwhelming, it wouldn’t surprise me if the big story in 2013 was its ‘undiscovery’ and the scientists admit a mistake or a misreading of the data. For 2013 one of my top resolutions is to finish my next book. Feel free to write and remind me of that at the end of 2013 if it remains uncompleted. It will be tricky as this coming semester I have a lot of teaching (if there are any of my History of Maths students reading, then watch The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Computer, there are two days left to watch.) Have a good...

Nate Silver Talk at Google...

Nate Silver has come to prominence recently through the seemingly simple method of predicting election results through statistics. I’ve just finished reading his book, The Signal and the Noise and it’s certainly one of my favourite books of the year. It covers all sorts of predictions, in baseball, chess, politics, earthquakes, terrorism, stocks, and more besides. If I were to recommend a Christmas book for a maths geek, then this would be the one. He recently gave a Google talk which you can see...