On the TV about Turing

Very short interview about on BBC NW news Alan Turing at the Museum of Science and Industry, next to The Baby.

Where was Alan Turing's office at Manchester?

So sitting here in the Alan Turing Building I was wondering where the great man used to sit and think. The Mathematics Department was housed in the attic of the John Owens Building until about 1952 when the department moved to the Williamson Building. I went to the university archive but all we could find was his personnel record (a single index card) and an entry in the 1953-54 University Calendar. It is not clear where the Computing Machine Laboratory would have been when it started in 1948. My suspicion is that at least at first he was in that attic. The reverse of the card has his home address and a newspaper obituary.







The address in Hale is new to me, but I think the one in Wilmslow has a blue plaque.

EIT and Electric Fish Bill on the TV News

Here is a clip of me on BBC NW Tonight the interview was by Stuart Flinders.

• The fish are Black Ghost Knife Fish and we bought them from Oasis Aquarium in Manchester
  
• Why is the idea behind the moment tensors? These were described by Habib Ammari at the EIT meeting and in his book. My hypothesis is that the fish can detect the difference between the moment tensors of the objects.
  
• Details on the science behind the electric fish can be found in Mark Nelson's talk the week before in Manchester. The sldes and a video stream of the talk are on line.
  
• I am not actually "doing experiments" I leave that to the experts. The fish are in the School of Maths for observation and to stimulate discussion.
  
• Why am I using a Game Boy Advance? It has a plug in module to convert it to a Digital Sampling Oscilloscope and Spectrum Analyser
  
• With the live Fish Cam (user fish password fish) you can see the School of Maths Aquarium yourself. It depends on the light how well you can see, and the knife fish don't like the lights so it is often off.
  

Salients and reverse salients

Which maths department are better than the average of that university and which are worse?

And what are the advantages/disadvantages of each?

I posted a chart to stimulate discussion.

Comparing Maths Departments 2009

I finally got around to uploading an updated web page Comparing Maths Departments in the UK. It now has a great big table that can be sorted by clicking on any column heading (thanks to Steven Liem in EPS Faculty IS support).


Bristol on many measures of research output seems to have joined the COWI club, there are some discussion of big departments doing generally better in the RAE, and yet some departments "punching above their weight".

Elelctric fish, intensive care and geophysics

What do these have in common? Weakly electric fish see in dark or murky water using electrosensing. Geophysicists use electric and electromagnetic fields to probe the earth and in intensive care medicine electrical impedance measurements being are used to monitor the lungs of patient who are on ventilator machines.

The mathematics of Inverse Problems is what brings these things together and at a meeting at the University of Manchester 15-19 June 2009 mathematicians, physicians, geophysicists and biologists studying weakly electric fish come together. Hopefully sharing information between these communities will lead to breakthroughs in all of these fields.

On Thursday the 18th June 12-1pm (BST) a lecture by Prof Mark Nelson "Electrosensory data acquisition and signal processing strategies in electric fish" will be video-streamed for all to see.

As the fish are the real experts the School of Mathematics has temporarily set up its own aquarium of weakly electric fish. Details here (we also have a live "fish cam"). For news stories on our electric fish follow that link too.

Wolfram Alpha

I tried Wolfram alpha for the first time today. I was pleased that it handled some mathematical queries without any special syntax. I asked Fourier transform of absolute value. It worked by I just tried it again and it timed out. Typing names of various chemicals was informative. Other information it gives was found to be inaccurate. For example it thinks The University of Manchester was founded in 1851. Take your pick from 1824 or 2004, but 1851 is just wrong. Source information is given, but it does not reference each fact separately so one cannot tell where they gone wrong. It seems they have used sources uncritcally without checking, or perhaps used out of date information (for example 1851 is probably listed as the founding date of the old Victoria University of Manchester, pre 2004). There is a feedback form but no reaction yet.

I also tried a fish Gnathonemus petersii. It got the common name wrong "Peter's elephantnose fish" instead of the correct "Peters' elephantnose fish". A look at the Latin name reveals that it is clearly named after Peters. A common mistake on the internet, but a glance at Wikipedia would have sorted them out!

So overall I am sure I will use it and it will develop. But without properly verifiable references it is less trustworthy than a well referenced Wikipedia article.

Ironic "construction manager of the year" award.

I love the Alan Turing Building, home of the School of Mathematics at Manchester. It is designed to maximize chance encounter and people therefore run in to each other and stand around talking about mathematics. Just as it was intended.

But like many construction project in the UK it is let down by lack of attention to detail. My PhD students have been in a room that is for most of the time too cold as cooled air is blown in. Rather ironically negating the value of the solar panels on the roof. Other rooms suffer from basic errors of control theory in their heading and ventilation.

Only now, a year and a half after we moved in, is sound insulation to be installed in the walls. Turns out they forgot to put it in at the time!

Just minor niggles you might say in an otherwise great building. However I read that Tony Grindrod has been nominated for Construction Manager of the Year for his work on the Alan Turing Building. So the state of the construction industry in the UK must be really bad. Just imagine the problems of the projects managed by less celebrated construction managers!