I am in Malaysia for a school for Malaysian PhD students and postdocs. I have given four hours of lectures on modelling how crystals form. That is a lot – about 200 slides to prepare. That was hard work, but teaching really helps your understanding. Generally if you understand something you can, hopefully, explain it […]
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The musical the King and I is based on a real, 19th century, king and a real country. The country is Siam, which is an old name for Thailand. The king is the king of Thailand in the mid 19th-century: King Mongkut. I am currently visiting the Bangkok university named after him: King Mongkut’s University of […]
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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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