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Dominic Welsh
Dominic Welsh died late last week. Dominic and I were tutors at Merton College, Oxford for nearly eleven years. I was the pure maths tutor and he was the applied maths tutor. But there was no other...
View ArticleNew Year
The youth could not help breaking a rule of courtesy towards this heavily burdened and yet, as he felt, noble man by asking: “But tell me, I beseech you, why do you carry on such wars on your star?...
View ArticleRichard Parker
Richard Parker died last month. Now only two of the authors of the ATLAS of finite groups remain, the two Robs. I knew Richard, but perhaps not well enough to write anything appropriate as a tribute....
View ArticleAnatoly Vershik
Anatoly Vershik died the day before yesterday. As I have told here, he was the person who told me about the Urysohn space. I had given a talk at the ECM in Barcelona on the countable random graph, and...
View ArticleWest Virginia University
Anthony Hilton, my former colleague at Queen Mary, spent some time as an Eberly Professor at West Virginia University. Now he has passed on to me the news that the University has decided to close down...
View ArticleA talk on discrete mathematics
The Academy for Discrete Mathematics and Applications is an Indian organisation founded in 2005 to foster and support interest in discrete mathematics. The current president, Ambat Vijayakumar, has...
View ArticleMy first doctoral student
One of the hardest things for a supervisor of a new doctoral student is to choose a research topic. It should be one which is not trivially easy or impossibly difficult. But of course it is impossible...
View ArticleThe end (or not?)
Rosemary and I have been in St Andrews for nearly twelve years, on temporary contracts. The current contract expires at the end of February 2025, and there is no money to renew it. So we will...
View ArticleCluster detection and error correction
A thought, possibly worthless, but I will record it anyway. Today I heard a talk by Brian Franczak from MacEwan University. It was on cluster detection in data, a big topic in artificial intelligence...
View ArticleBill Jackson
My former colleague Bill Jackson is retiring from Queen Mary. Robert Johnson has put together a nice tribute to Bill, which you can find at...
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