Theo Todman's Web Page - Notes Pages

Status Reports

Status: Mathematics (2010 - September)

(Text as at 18/12/2010 19:58:05)

*** THIS IS NOT THE LATEST VERSION OF THIS NOTE ***

Rationale for this Project

This is rather an eccentric activity, partly an attempt to exorcise some ancient demon – the rather bruising experience of reading mathematics at King’s College Cambridge back in the mid 1970’s. However, any modern educated person should be reasonably up to date with the mathematical sciences, and statistical and probability theory are essential tools for evaluating evidence. If only it wasn’t such a difficult subject. This project is diverging from Mathematics per se to the Philosophy of Mathematics and other related subjects.


Summary of Progress during September 2010

This project continued pretty much in abeyance throughout September, during which I expended only 2.75 hours (83.75 hours YTD where, as always in these reports, the “year” is an academic year starting in October 2009). This was expended on starting to read "Omnes (Roland) - Quantum Philosophy - Understanding and Interpreting Contemporary Science".

The purpose of this particular report is mainly to record the time-totals for the 2009/10 academic year. As I’ve just started an MA course at Heythrop, I’ll be too busy to do much on this project in the near future, so have abandoned my practise of forward planning. I’ve yet to decide on the frequency of future reports.


Summary of Progress to Date

1. I have downloaded a variety of course-material from the websites of various London Colleges, together with stuff from the Oxford and Cambridge websites, focusing on those courses having exercises with worked examples. I’ve also dusted off my old Cambridge notes, which seem to have been written by someone else.
2. As a warm-up exercise, I started a first-year course on discrete mathematics from the LSE.
3. Listened to the Open Yale course "Bailyn (Charles) - Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics".
4. Made an attempt at answering¹ the problem-set in “advanced elementary” mathematics associated with the King’s Mathematics Reunion of January 2009.
5. Read:-
   • "Bais (Sander) - Very Special Relativity: An Illustrated Guide",
   • "Doxiadis (Apostolos) - Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture",
   • "Doxiadis (Apostolos) & Papadimitriou (Christos H.) - Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth", and
   • "Magueijo (Joao) - Faster Than The Speed of Light: The Story of a Scientific Speculation".
   .