Programming and typesetting
Is computer typesetting a kind of programming? One of the pioneers, Donald Knuth, clearly thought so. In The TeXBook, he gives TeX code for computing and typesetting the first thirty primes; apart...
View ArticleNew Year
The youth could not help breaking a rule of courtesy towards this heavily burdened and yet, as he felt, noble man by asking: “But tell me, I beseech you, why do you carry on such wars on your star?...
View ArticleSimon Norton lecture
I have been honoured by an invitation to give the inaugural Simon Norton lecture at the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences on 12 February. The webpage is here. Of course there are other people...
View ArticleCauchy’s theorem for the prime 6
Before you think I have gone totally crackers: Cauchy’s theorem says that a finite group whose order is divisible by a prime number p contains a subgroup which is cyclic of order p. My co-authors and...
View ArticleMore on Cauchy numbers
Following on from the earlier post, the new version of the paper has just gone on the arXiv: 2311.15652 (version 2). If we say that n is a Cauchy number if there is a finite set F of finite groups,...
View ArticleRichard Parker
Richard Parker died last month. Now only two of the authors of the ATLAS of finite groups remain, the two Robs. I knew Richard, but perhaps not well enough to write anything appropriate as a tribute....
View ArticleAnatoly Vershik
Anatoly Vershik died the day before yesterday. As I have told here, he was the person who told me about the Urysohn space. I had given a talk at the ECM in Barcelona on the countable random graph, and...
View ArticleCauchy numbers: job done
After recruiting Scott Harper to the team, we have finished the job of determining all the Cauchy numbers (these are the positive integers n for which there exists a finite list F of finite groups so...
View ArticleWest Virginia University
Anthony Hilton, my former colleague at Queen Mary, spent some time as an Eberly Professor at West Virginia University. Now he has passed on to me the news that the University has decided to close down...
View ArticleIschia group theory conference 2024
The island of Ischia, about a 45-minute hydrofoil ride from Napoli, is rich in history. The museum has a Homeric drinking cup with an inscription in ancient Greek from the 8th century BCE. At the...
View ArticleA talk by Gareth Jones
Today I attended (remotely) a nice talk by Gareth Jones in the Ural Workshop on Group Theory and Combinatorics, about prime powers in permutation group theory and polynomials taking prime values in...
View ArticleGraphs and groups, designs and dynamics
Four and a half year ago there was a conference and summer school on the four topics of the title (part of the G2 series of conferences, whose hiistory you can read here) at the Three Gorges...
View ArticleBritish Combinatorial Conference
The British Combinatorial Conference returns to Queen Mary Univesity of London in the first week of July. The web page is here. Last time when the conference was there, and I was one of the...
View ArticleA talk on discrete mathematics
The Academy for Discrete Mathematics and Applications is an Indian organisation founded in 2005 to foster and support interest in discrete mathematics. The current president, Ambat Vijayakumar, has...
View ArticleMy first doctoral student
One of the hardest things for a supervisor of a new doctoral student is to choose a research topic. It should be one which is not trivially easy or impossibly difficult. But of course it is impossible...
View ArticleDominic Welsh memorial service
To Oxford last Saturday for the memorial service for Dominic Welsh. I wrote about Dominic here; the picture was taken at Geoff Whittle’s conference in Wellington in December 2015, if my memory serves....
View ArticleTwo conferences, two mysteries
Two conferences in recent days. Time permitting, I would say more about each. I just want to point to two mysteries and some synergy. Last week I was at the British Mathematical Colloquium in...
View ArticleNew BCC website
The British Combinatorial Committee has a new website: www.britishcombinatorics.org.uk/ Take a look, and pass on any comments! My personal thanks to Julia Wolf. The WordPress site I maintained for...
View ArticleSimplicial complexes on groups
At the recent UMI/AMS joint meeting in Palermo, I had some brief discussions with somebody about this topic. But I didn’t get contact details. If it is you, and you happen to be reading this, please...
View ArticleThe end (or not?)
Rosemary and I have been in St Andrews for nearly twelve years, on temporary contracts. The current contract expires at the end of February 2025, and there is no money to renew it. So we will...
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