Posted by martin on
Saturday, 09 August 2008 at 10:09
Sorry for the recent loss of service on this blog, because Rails on the server was upgraded. I'll try and catch up on posts from my holiday over the next few days.
I spent two days in Lyon, which had more worth seeing than I expected. The old town is on a steep hill, and the youth hostel was half way up the hill, so there was a lot of climbing. The town is at the confluence of the rivers Rhône and Sâone so you can't go far without crossing a bridge.
My favourite bit was the nineteenth century Basilique Notre-Dame de Fourvière, on the top of the hill. The outside is overly fancy, but the inside is right up my street - classical basilica plan, decorated with large mosaics showing scenes from church history connected with the Virgin. I also visited the Musée des Beaux-Arts, with lots of fine paintings, and the textile museum - important because Lyon was a centre of silk-weaving, but not very exciting.
Tags france, holiday
Posted by martin on
Thursday, 17 July 2008 at 14:30
I have spent two nights in Amiens, a city in northern France. Its cathedral is striking mostly for its size, the biggest Gothic building in France. It has a pair of oddly asymmetrical towers on the front. At night, the normally white front of the cathedral is illuminated to show the colours the statues would originally have been painted. It makes it look magically alive, and must be quite a feat of projection to illuminate all the little bits of statues in different colours.
On my way from Amiens to Lyon, I passed through Paris, walking from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyon. I don't want to stay any longer in Paris, partly because I don't feel like anywhere so big and busy just now and partly because I already saw quite a bit there a few years ago.
Tags france, holiday
Posted by martin on
Sunday, 13 July 2008 at 21:12
I have just spent a week at the National Mathematics Summer School in Birmingham. Forty-two fourth/fifth form students are invited, the idea being to expose them to a broader range of mathematics than they get in school. Six sixth-formers are also invited; as well as being given some maths of their own, they are expected to look after a group of the younger children. I was at the summer school myself in 2001, and as a senior in 2002, but haven't been since.
This week had a strong geometrical flavour - four of the seniors' five sessions had a geometrical or topological theme, and there was much building of models of solids, either from plastic kits or origami. I gave the seniors a talk on hyperbolic geometry - a change from the Euclidean geometry I usually do at olympiad training camps. I think it went pretty well, and managed not to be too hard for them. I felt like I had not much to do overall at the camp, despite there being surprisingly few permanent staff. Still I enjoyed it, and it reaches a lot more children than the formal Olympiad training scheme.
Since the summer school finished on Friday, I have been staying with my aunt in Hove. I visited the magnificent Brighton Pavilion, the hilly town of Lewes and Seaford, on the sea. Tomorrow I am going on to France.
Tags holiday, imo, nmss, travel
Posted by martin on
Thursday, 19 June 2008 at 14:56
I am now officially a Wrangler (someone who gets a first in Part II of the Cambridge Maths Tripos). The results were announced this morning in the University Senate House - the chairman of the examiners stands in the balcony and reads out the lists of people awarded each class (another peculiarity of Maths Parts II and III; usually the list is just posted on a notice board outside the Senate House).
I will not however be graduating this year because I will be doing Part III Maths next year. This is not a proper postgraduate course - you don't get a degree at the end of it - and not eligible for postgraduate funding; until recently there has been an exception allowing you to continue to get undergraduate funding despite already having a degree. The government have noticed this year that this is no longer allowed, so now we have to not graduate until next year in order to continue to get funding.
Tags cambridge, tripos
Posted by martin on
Saturday, 07 June 2008 at 13:11
I had exams for the past week. For the past few weeks, I was doing not much but revising, although I went to Oundle two weeks ago for an IMO training camp and the final team selection. I did another geometry problem session, which was not as good as my one at Trinity because I had less time to prepare due to exam revision and because I had already used lots of my favourite questions on the first sheet.
I had four exams this week. All are essentially the same, and you are free to choose from 38 questions on all the different courses in the year. Of course noone has taken anywhere near all the courses - I took 12 and revised 9. In the end I did an average of five questions on each exam; I might have liked to do a bit more, but that is more than adequate for a first.
With exams over, I have a couple of weeks until the results with nothing in particular to do.
Tags cambridge, imo, teaching, trinity, tripos