On 7 December 2020 I gave a (virtual) lecture at the Australian Mathematical Olympiad Committee’s School of Excellence on congruences.
From Here to Hensel
Here’s a nice maths problem, which I thought it would be fun to discuss. The question doesn’t involve any advanced concepts, but it leads on to a very nice result called Hensel’s lemma.
Return of the Euler-Fermat theorem
A long long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I wrote up an account of the Euler-Fermat theorem for school students.
Topology: The shape of space
Monash Open Day in 2020 was a purely online affair, thanks to COVID. I recorded a video talking about Topology: The Shape of Space.
Sitting out the math wars
Very few professional mathematicians have been involved in the “math wars”, and when they have, they have not always inspired confidence. I wondered why.
Not human, but inhabited by humans: writing mathematics
Mathematics can be written in many ways. One approach, very popular with professional pure mathematicians, is to write as little as possible. But there should also be others.
“I liked doing what I wasn’t supposed to do”: the life and mathematics of Karen Uhlenbeck
In September 2019 I gave a talk about the life and some of the mathematics of Karen Uhlenbeck, the great mathematician and first woman to win an Abel Prize. This was a Monash LunchMaths seminar.
Breakthroughs in primary school arithmetic
Humans have known how to multiply natural numbers for a long time. In primary school you learn how to multiply numbers using an algorithm which is often called long multiplication, but it’s called “long” for a reason! Recently, a new paper purports to give an algorithm to multiply faster.
From Liouville geometry to contact geometry
(Technical) We’re going to take Liouville structures and move them into 3 dimensions, to obtain contact structures.
Lovely Liouville geometry
(Technical) I’d like to show you some very nice geometry, involving some vector fields and differential forms.