Martin's Blog

Journey home

Posted by martin on Thursday, 13 December 2007 at 20:34

I am now back in Belfast. I came via Holyhead and Dublin on Monday. The first train was delayed, arriving 7 minutes late in Nuneaton, the time my next train was due to depart. So I was late all the rest of the way, and had to get a later ferry than planned, and to Dublin instead of Dun Laoghaire (not that that makes much difference). I got home eventually.

This article begins by remarking that there are no bins on the underground for security reasons. Some English trains and railway stations have bins, some do not; I don’t know if this is for security reasons or not. This seems to render rather pointless the careful education we received at primary school to always use a litter bin. But also the effect - at least at Chester station - is that people leave their cups and packets all over the place. Could a terrorist not leave a bomb in a takeaway cup just as easily as in a bin? OK, this limits the size, but so does the hole in many bins.

Last weekend, before I came home, was spent marking the first round of the British Mathematical Olympiad. About 30 people spent a day and a half marking on the order of 1000 papers. This year for the first time marked scripts are to be sent back to the candidates. I suspect these will often be hard to interpret, and it will take a few years for the markers to properly take this into account when marking, but it should be valuable in giving people a greater idea of how the papers are marked and what they did wrong.

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Michaelmas 2007

Posted by martin on Saturday, 01 December 2007 at 16:55

I have managed to get through an entire term without posting anything - this wasn’t intended, but I have been very busy this term. A major part of the reason for that was that I did a lot of work - six 24-lecture courses, where I have done at most five in a term in the past. At the start of term I had only intended to do four or five courses. When I told Imre (my Director of Studies) that I wanted to do Principles of Quantum Mechanics because of its algebraic rather than physical content he told me I should do Linear Analysis, which covers the underlying mathematical ideas needed for most of physics in a very abstract way. This wasn’t quite what I meant - QM is mathematically elegant in its own right - but I enjoyed both.

I was convinced to do Probability and Measure, which I hadn’t intended to do, but turned out to be the course I enjoyed most. It puts the idea of probability on a rigorous footing, along with integration, and contains a lot of hard pure mathematics - most people, including me, found it difficult.

I also did Dynamical Systems, which looks at methods of figuring out the approximate long-term behaviour of equations which cannot be solved exactly. This turned out not to be as fun as I had hoped. Finally I did Graph Theory (graphs here are simple systems of dots some of which may be joined up) and Coding and Cryptography.

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