Professor of Mathematics. Author of Symmetry and the Monster — a popular account of one of the great quests in mathematics. Specialist in Mesopotamian history and literature. Cold-water swimmer. Regular reviewer of opera and ballet.
This is the interesting article in the ROH Sleeping Beauty Programme, courtesy of its author and the Royal Opera House. Behind the Fairytale by Sebastian Cody. The budget for the first production of The Sleeping Beauty ‘almost equalled the cost of two warships’, or so said a recent Russian expert. This is perhaps a slight …
Those of us who partake in open air swimming should be allowed to return to this miraculous prophylactic, despite the semi-lockdown. The Critic, 12 November 2020.
Recollections about elections from the post-Vietnam era when I first went to America, and their relevance today. The Article, 11 November 2020.
The man who first glimpsed the Monster has died. He came to this vision via very precise arguments, but later had to fight German students who wanted to cancel his branch of mathematics. We need his type again to fight the new battle against those who would turn mathematics from careful argument and precision to woolliness and confusion. The Critic 24 August 2020.
If ‘decolonising maths’ means reassessing who did what, we need to put Greek geometry into perspective. Who invented algebra? And for modern arithmetic we have to thank the Sumerians, whose ethnicity and skin colour remains conveniently unknown. My article in The Critic, 7 July 2020
Academics in this country need to allow new ideas rather than orthodoxy and group-think. See my article in The Critic on 22 June 2020 about the dis-invitation of a physicist who was scheduled to give a technical talk.
My tribute to the extraordinarily creative mathematician John Horton Conway. Originally from Liverpool, he died on 11 April, aged 82. Published in The Article, 16 April, 2020.
The long history of why there are 360 degrees in a circle. The short answer is that it was due to the Babylonians. History Today, 23 March 2020.
Symmetry and the Monster is the story of a mathematical quest that began two hundred years ago in revolutionary France, led to the biggest collaboration ever between mathematicians across the world, and revealed the ‘Monster’ – not monstrous at all, but a structure of exquisite beauty and complexity.
This book tells for the first time the fascinating story of the biggest theorem ever to have been proved. Mark Ronan graphically describes not only the last few decades of the chase, but also some of the more interesting byways, including my personal favourite, the one I called “Monstrous Moonshine”.
John H. Conway, von Neumann Chair of Mathematics, Princeton University
Opera on 3: for the BBC Radio 3 broadcast (on 19 November 2016) of Parsifal from this summer’s Bayreuth Festival, I was the guest with presenter Christopher Cook. We discussed the opera and its production, which I reviewed for the Daily Telegraph on 27 July 2016.
Truth and Beauty: The Hidden World of Symmetry |
On the face of it, symmetry may seem simple, but diving beneath the surface reveals a whole new world. Over the last 100 years, the mathematical idea of symmetry has proved to be a guiding light for the world of physics. But what does a mathematician mean by symmetry? How does this link in with the world around us? And could it be the key to the mysterious ‘Theory of Everything’?
This was a BBC Radio programme on Symmetry in the Naked Scientists series. Here is the link
