On chaos and the teaching of mathematics, in no particular order

The normal busyness continues apace but I fancy punctuating this chaos with a little update. I'm currently doing some proofreading of a book (not my own) which is both fascinating and densely packed with information (I'll reveal details when possible). At the same time I'm attempting to get two papers finished before Christmas and if at all possible next week.

Ah, yes, and I'm back in Santiago, if only briefly. My carbon footprint continues to increase month on month and December is no exception as I had to come back to Santiago for a week in between my Dublin trip and Christmas. After an 11 hour mammoth journey back to Spain on Thursday (starting from Oxford at 4am and culminating in a 4pm collapse back home) I have lots of things to finish before I head off again on Thursday including giving a short talk to the postdocs and grad students in the department. I'll be introducing in 15 minutes the depths of string theory, gauge theories, the problems with strong coupling dynamics, AdS/CFT and its applications to heavy ion physics, and more importantly why they should care about all this. This will be aimed at a diverse audience ranging from the groups which work on non-linear systems to those in nanotechnology and beyond. Anyway, it'll be a challenge but it should be a fun one.

Christmas farewells are filling the evenings, with a big party last night (in which I managed to make sushi for a group of 30+ whilst avoiding food poisoning, the latter being my principle triumph) and dinners until I leave but somehow I have to get these papers finished and as much of the book proofread as possible in the meantime (snide comments about my own bad spelling are not strictly necessary/neccessarry/necisary/nessacary).

On the night before coming back to Spain I had dinner with a friend of my parents, an ex maths teacher who has spent a great deal of time attempting to spread his ideas for teaching maths not only more effectively, but in a way which avoids the building up of the normal hierarchy of students in a class which leads to a range of bad feeling between those who can and those who can't. The method is simple and I'd like to talk more about this some time, but the basic idea is to get the students to read out a very short section from an appropriately chosen text book following which another student will explain what the section means. I think this is an extremely intelligent way to get pupils not only to be able to solve maths problems but to truly understand the workings of mathematics as they are introduced to it. Far too much emphasis is put on getting kids to learn through repetition of solving problems and not enough is put on building up the background of true understanding which is needed for getting onto ever more complex concepts without getting lost in the forest of terminology and notation. Clearly problem solving itself is necessary for polishing the edges but problem solving is infinitely easier if one has a thorough understand of the internal workings of mathematics rather than simply knowing how to turn the handle.  Unfortunately it seems that getting teachers to try this method is extremely difficult, especially in the current climate where schools are terrified of trying anything new for fear of dropping down the league tables - one of several curses of the current UK education system. Anyway, I'd love to devote some more time to discussing this so we'll see if the Christmas 'break' allows. Until then, it's back to reading and typing...

Ireland way

Feeling pangs of blog neglect these days but I'm spending every evening reading up on a range of new subjects that I'm currently interested in. I'll explain when possible, but in the mean time it simply means that life is twice as full as ever before and that blogging rears its head only when something time-dependent is closing in, or when the guilt gets too much.

I'm off to Dublin via London tomorrow where I'll be giving a talk and spending plenty of time talking with my friend and collaborator at the IAS. Flight prices mean that it's actually cheaper to spend a couple of days back in the UK on the way back so I'll be popping home briefly before coming back for the final week of the year in Spain where I have another talk lined up which I'll explain nearer the time - a slightly unusual one.

Anyway, finishing off my Dublin talk now and pondering the woes of dispersive media from holography.

Kafka in transit

Sometimes the time spent in airports is mirrored in their unending depths. In fact Barajas isn't a bad place to be stranded for a few hours, and I got some work done in between flights from Dublin and to Santiago. More of that soon, I hope.

Click if the image is cut off on the right of your screen.

Interlude

Now in Dublin after a long day yesterday. I spent a tiring but surprisingly enjoyable five hours at the airport in Madrid waiting for the second leg of my journey but a discussion of the strange mix of mathematics and neuroscience I had a chance to read will have to wait.

I'll be giving a seminar tomorrow but will try and write something up tonight if my talk is looking in shape by then.

Year on year

My Mathematica programs are biting back today and undocumented interpolationpoints commands are laughing at me every time I turn away. Still, answers are converging in hoped for directions and all should be well soon.

Anyway, I haven't had a chance to write up much more about my trip to Porto, but I will put up a couple more photos from this splendid city.

On the Sunday as I walked around the city with some friends from Couchsurfing, and waited for my midnight bus, I had a chance to go to a few wonderful viewing areas to see the city as the sun was setting. In particular the rather charming Crystal Palace gardens (no longer with a Crystal Palace, but a somewhat less attractive auditorium) gives a great view over the river, with the Port Cellars peppering the opposite bank:

Further along the coast the scenery changes considerably and you get a real view of the ocean and the smell of the sea replaces the smell of ancient city life:

A few more photos to process at some point too, but they will have to wait.

Anyway, everything is busy as ever at the moment, with a short trip to Dublin to give a seminar in a couple of weeks, and a semi-public lecture on atmospheric optics to give at the beginning of December. I'll be heading to Madrid to give a talk at the Christmas meeting too, before heading back home for a few days over Christmas and the new year.

Today we had a fascinating talk on the use of Turing machines to study evolution and I spent lunch quizzing the speaker on many things which have been on my mind since the amazing talks by James Glazier on morphogenisis back in 2007 in Beijing.

On a side note, I've now been living outside China for almost exactly a year. I never imagined how much I would miss the place, and although I'm extremely happy here in Spain, in the department, in the city and in my current position, there is something unreplacable about life in that sprawling, dirty, glorious city of fourteen million, which is at the same time undescribable and unforgettable. I was hugely lucky to have the chance I had in China, and am equally lucky now to be here in Santiago, in a very different, but equally stimulating environment.

Anyway, Mathematica seems to be giving me better answers now, so I should get back to it...

Advanced study in Dublin

Sorry, things are quiet on the blog front and I'm very busy with running round in circles.

Having spent a very enjoyable few days in Cambridge at the Newton institute with my former supervisor, chatting through ideas both new and old and possible new directions for further study I have now made it to the Institute for Advanced Study, in a very rainy Dublin, where I'm spending a couple of days. Today I gave my talk and tomorrow we will be hearing from one of the professors here on some interesting work related to emergent geometry.

Hopefully I will have a few hours on Saturday to see the city before flying back to England for less than 48 hours, and then back to Santiago to try and furnish my flat (my first night in the new flat, just before flying to England, was spent on a half inflated airbed covered only by a winter coat!).

A 4.15 start this morning to catch my 6.30 flight means that I'm a little tired, but the talk seemed to go ok and the questions were all interesting. Now, with a few loose ends to tie up I'm going to see if I can get me a Guinness.