and the
trouble and strife.
Anyone interested in Euclidean Geometry should have a look at Christopher Bradley's writings.
He has written and edited some books which you must purchase otherwise you will contract a horrible disfiguring disease (see picture). The most widely used is the steamy Introductory Mathematics: Algebra and Analysis which is aimed at people making the transition from school mathematics to university-style pure mathematics. I have also written scripts (and sometimes appeared in) DVDs aimed at people interested in maths competitions published by UKMT and Highperception.
He tries to prove theorems and these sometimes surface in his CV.
He is the leader of the UK International Mathematical Olympiad team and is chair of the British Mathematical Olympiad.
He is he the current holder of the celebrated Microphone d'Or as the most garrulous juror of IMO 2009 in Germany. Here is a picture of my previous Microphone d'Or, with friends and colleagues Ceri Fiddes and Joseph Myers, won at IMO Slovenia 2006. Here is a close up of the sacred platic.
He chairs the committee which administers Royal Institution Mathematics Masterclasses in Bath, Bristol and Swindon.
He administers the communications service Group Pub Forum for the Group Theory research community.
Here is some applied stuff for people who like that sort of thing:
Snail Venom My colleague in our Chemistry Department Jonathon Cox writes "Some members of a group of marine snails known as cone snails (because of their shape) eat fish, which poses a problem: snails are slow and fish are fast, so how does a snail catch a fish? The solution is reasonably remarkable. The snail tags the fish with a harpoon made from a special hollow barbed tooth. The tooth is hollow because it contains a deadly poison which paralyses the fish instantaneously. The fish immobilised, the snail then engulfs it with a distensible stomach and proceeds to eat it alive."
"The snail's venom consists of peptides, small strings of amino acids, which are cross-linked by certain amino acids in the string known as cysteines. Two cysteines form a cross link. Typically the peptides contain 2, 4, 6 or 8 cysteines (i.e four cross links) and there are no more than 30 amino acids in a single peptide (and no less than 8). Cross-linking gives the peptide a specific shape which is then able to specifically interact with (and block) a nerve receptor of the complementary shape. Each different combination of cysteines gives rise to, by and large, a different peptide shape."
Here is a paper on how to mess with snail venom by S. J. Palmer, M. R. Redfern, GCS and J. P. L. Cox Sticky Egyptians: A technique for assembling genes encoding contrained peptides of variable length and some supporting mathematics.
Contact Information:
Dr Geoff Smith Email: G.C.Smith@bath.ac.uk
Department of Mathematical Sciences Tel: +44 (0)1225 386182 (direct)
University of Bath Fax: +44 (0)1225 386492
Bath BA2 7AY Room: 4W2.16
England UKMT volunteer,
BMO chair,
IMOAB member.
The email address
G.C.Smith@bath.ac.uk
is the shiny new
official University of Bath format, though once upon a time the shiny new
format was masgcs@bath.ac.uk --
the one that people actually use
is, of course, entirely different: gcs@maths.bath.ac.uk -- as far
as I know, all these incantations work.
Whereabouts:
Club and Conferences:
The inside of the PC resembles both my office and home.
University Centre,
Bath Mathematics
People
and the
trouble and strife.