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>> 29.07.04

"You're a right strophoid"
A curious characteristic of academic departments is their tendency to put up strange posters to try and make the department look a bit more interesting, whilst at the same time discussing subject areas of the appropriate discipline and trying to make them seem as if they have something to do with the real world. (Taking this logic one step further, the University of Surrey has as its catchphrase "Understanding the Real World", which seems to me to put a clear distance between what universities are supposed to be and what... {>>}

>> 26.07.04

School barbecue
That the last few entries to the PhD diary have been filed in the "off-topic" category should tell you something about the mathematics I am concentrating on at the moment: it doesn't make for interesting reading. Actually, that is not true, for it does make for interesting reading: it's just that I haven't been keeping a worhtwhile track of it here for the last few months and so am putting off what will prove to be quite a task in bringing things up to dats mathematically speaking. Hence the dependence... {>>}

>> 22.07.04

Popular maths
Having been sure I had talked about the Clay Institute's Millennium prize before, I was slightly bemused to find no reference to it in this diary. Never mind, for an article in the latest edition of the London Review of Books talks about it for me. Or rather, it does what all maths (and science, for that matter) popularisation seems to do of late: talk about it in such a way as to make the talking about it as close to pointless as a line. Thus, the deliberate lack of... {>>}

>> 20.07.04

Higher noon
The all new and improved PhD-diarist is now back from moving houses and is well on the way to catching up with work that has been neglected of late and thus can spend some time making up for the lack of entries here. Although work has suffered quite considerably from all of the recent distractions, progress is being made towards the end of year report which is due in October, the first part of which is a reasonable proof that is setting on my desk, waiting to be edited. But... {>>}