Links
Bristol maths. Swansea maths. Oxford maths. Cambridge maths. MathSciNet.
Seminnars in Bristol: Algebra and Geometry Seminar, Heilbronn Seminar
People: John Baez, Dave Benson, Christine Bessenrodt, John Britnell, Roger Bryant, David Craven, Anton Cox, Steve Doty, Charles Eaton, Karin Erdmann, Matt Fayers, Jan Grabowski, Zen Harper, David Hemmer, Anne Henke, Gordon James, Sinead Lyle, Andrew Mathas, John Murray, Nikolay Nikolov, Alison Parker, Jeremy Rickard.
Oxford algebra group. BLOC homepage. Representation theory on the Arxiv. Rail timetable. Trinity College. Part III courses. Unix help. LaTeX tips. Kew Gardens. Improbable Science.
Conformal
A program to help one visualise complex functions. It was written in Objective C for Mac OS X (an amazingly nice way to program, even if the basic language is C). Here is a screenshot. Here is a link to version 0.22; this is a universal binary, so it should work natively on both Intel and PPC Macs running Mac OS X 10.4 or greater. On OS X 10.2 the latest version that works is version 0.2. (For changes see here.)
Suggestions and comments are very welcome.
I wrote this program after Matt Towers implemented the idea in Java: he has kindly given me permission to mirror his applet version here.
Monads and Haskell
While category theory is ubiquitious in modern algebra, it seems at least as well suited to describing what's going on in functional programming languages. Some links: Real world Haskell (I suspect this may become a classic), Haskell.org, Monads for the working Haskell programmer, Monad tranformers, Glasgow Haskell Compiler, some nice exercises.
I plan, one day, to write some sort of introductory account (for mathematicians) of how monads arise in functional programming, and their use in unifying the programming required to solve problems which appear to require some sort of back-tracking: sudoku, finding a matching in a bipartite graph, chess, poker, etc.
The picture on the left comes from my attempt at a Oxford Comlab practical on L-Systems in Haskell. Apparently it's inaccessible outside of Oxford: why? Surely they have less to hide than some universities.
Satire
Mostly rather old now, but sometimes surprisingly relevant.
- Playing soliders (25th May 2000)
- Duke declares war on grey squirrels
- Slaughter of the innocents (3rd August)
- Compassionate conservatism
- Elgin Marbles
- Liberal Democrat earns money (7th August)
- A vicious game. Updated with the Dorneywood Rules Variation.
- Obit, Peter Birr
- Rodents take over house (14th August)
- Achieve success by adjusting your expectations
- The Silly Season (précis) (13th September)
- Come the millenium (8th November)
- The problem with satire (29th April 2001)
- Nuclear matters (5th Apr 2004)
- The Attentive Reader (1st Mar 2006)
- Pympyhllnynt cwrt y Abertawe (2006–2007)
- A mathematical proposal (25th Feb 2008)
- Canis Academicus (10th Oct 2008)
Nethack
Index of spoilers. Probably too easy to exploit, but I can recommend Sporkhack for more of a challenge.
How to teach quotient groups
When young and brash, I had strong views (1999) on this subject.