George Pólya, the Hungarian mathematician, told a story about taking a walk and meeting the same couple over and over again. He became embarrassed about appearing to spy on them, but it got him thinking about the likelihood of repeated meetings between objects moving at random. In 1921 he published his famous recurrence theorem*, which […]
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Together with a colleague, Joe Keddie, I am teaching a final year optional course called ‘Soft Matter and Biological Physics’. Joe is teaching the students about polymers; polymers are a classic part of soft matter physics. I am doing the biological physics part. It is good for Joe and I to make the module an […]
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Last week I lectured on how bone size scales with the size of animals, and how we can use simple physics to understand this (notes are here if you’re interested). So, this New Scientist article is extremely well timed. At a conference on fluid dynamics next month, Patricia Yang and coworkers from Georgia Tech will present […]
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I am responsible for teaching computing to 2nd years. Some students take to programming (in this case in Fortran, but this applies generally) like a duck to water, others sometimes sink a bit at first. I think part of the problem is that some can think like a computer very naturally, while for others it is […]
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Very recently, the physical science bit of the 2013 IPCC report on climate change came out. I took a look at the summary for policymakers (link to report here). As I often do with a scientific paper, I got bored quickly with reading the intro, and skipped forward to the figures – where the data is. […]
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