This is a post on the eye condition ‘wet’ macular degeneration (WMD), there will be about as much of the other sort of WMD as there were in Iraq. I was at a conference on mathematical biology a couple of weeks ago, and heard some great talks. One of the most inspiring was on what […]
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Like a lot of people I am watching a fair bit of the olympics. What the athletes can do is amazing, they are astonishingly fit and skilled. I am also working on how crystals start off life. You may think that there is no connection between the Olympics and crystallisation. But there is, the connection […]
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I think slinky springs are great. The slow motion videos of the slinky are just cool. I also love the fact that towards the end, they interview the guy with the computer model of the slinky spring, and it is just transparent that he loves working out what is happening, just for its own sake. Thanks […]
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This is a quote, of disputed origin. A very of-the-moment example of scientific theft is the Higgs boson. This was proposed by Peter Higgs and others who stole the idea of a symmetry-breaking mode and Higgs boson from another field of physics. This kind of theft is common and 100% OK – providing that you […]
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Last week I was at a conference on mathematical biology in Durham. I will get to the biology in a bit, but first the mathematics, in particular geometry. You can make precisely five (not four or six) different regular solid shapes using only regular polygons, and where at every corner of the shape the same number of these polygons meet. The cube is probably the most familiar one. This is made from six squares (a square is a four-sided polygon), and at each corner, three of these squares meet. There are exactly four other shapes, one of which is the icosahedron shown to the left. The icosahedron is made of triangles (three-sided polygons), not squares, and here at each corner five of these triangles meet. The icosahedron has 20 of these triangles.
I find it somehow continually surprising, that there are precisely five and only five such shapes possible. It just seems a bit weird to me. Even more weirdly, we have known that you can only make five of these solid shapes since the time of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato (born about 427 BC). These five shapes are the most symmetric, and so many people think, the most beautiful. They are called the Five Platonic Solids, because they are mentioned in works by Plato.
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From Weds to Friday last week I visited Ghana to do some volunteering in the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Kumasi, Ghana. I taught some medical statistics as well as grant writing skills to the attendees of the 2nd Annual HIV, Hepatitis B and Hepatitis C Conference, which was being held in Kumasi. The aim […]
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