Ian Short

I recommend this short video for the vision of Rewilding Britain.

Many thanks to those who attended today’s Royal Institution Masterclass on Navigating by numbers, which I hosted together with Margaret Stanier. The desmos activities will remain active for a couple of weeks yet, available at https://student.desmos.com/join/8k8baa. Here are the slides from the masterclass.

Thank you to those who joined Andrew and me tonight for the Navigating by numbers online workshop as part of Maths Week Scotland. Here’s the abstract for the workshop: Our exploration will take us from intriguing frieze patterns of numbers, through triangulated polygons and repeated fractions, to a beautiful infinite tessellation with remarkable properties. Along […]

I had the pleasure today of delivering a workshop in Belfast on The mathematics of dessins d’enfants as part of the Northern Ireland Science Festival 2020. This workshop explored some of the more geometric aspects of the Navigating by Numbers outreach programme. The abstract sums it up: The workshop will be an interactive exploration of […]

Today marks the launch of the Navigating by numbers outreach programme. The purpose of this programme is to communicate an attractive array of mathematical ideas centred on the Farey graph to as wide an audience as possible – from school learners to academic researchers. My PhD student Margaret Stanier and I launched the programme with an […]

Extinction Rebellion’s International Rebellion begins today in London. Please support them! I will join them later in the week. The environmental collapse of the Earth is summed up well by the first lines of David Wallace-Wells The Uninhabitable Earth: It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, […]

Swifts returned to Woburn Sands today, just two so far. One house martin flying around as well.

This is a wonderful, inspiring book of wilding at the Knepp Estate in West Sussex. The author and her husband own a few thousand of acres of land around Knepp Castle, which until twenty years ago was heavily farmed. In the early 2000s, however, they began giving up parts of the land to wildlife. Following […]

Caroline Lucas (MP for the Green Party) tabled a motion to the UK parliament on the 13 March to recognise that the world has a climate emergency. The motion proposes that the government introduces a new green deal to radically reduce the production of greenhouse gases. The motion is here – UK-wide climate emergency. It […]

First butterfly of the year, by the River Ouzel. Apparently small tortoiseshell, brimstone, and painted lady are also out in places (they all hibernate). Song thrushes are singing at the OU, which seems odd, early.