Teaching and Learning

Pluto isn't doing much here. In fact he's not doing anything at all. But from his sedentary position, he is demonstrating an important piece of mathematics. Doesn't he always?

Latest episode of 'the Summer of Sam'.

Equations (in seven tongues) and al-Khwarizmi are the stars of Tower of Babel Episode 8. 

A long time ago, in a distant land called the English summer, you'd often see, in gardens, long tubes, usually made of rubber or plastic. At the end of these tubes, hands would wave the tube about and water might - or might not - gush. Happy days.

Do we spend much time thinking about colleagues' mathematical schooldays? Presumably they were all a bit similar, it being maths, the universal language etc. But behind each story lies language (or lack of it). And political circumstance.

Here's Radek.

The recent original student production Noether, the story of mathematician Emmy Noether in her and her contemporaries' own words, is now available on our YouTube Channel. And the production will be back in the building in the autumn for one night only before touring.

It's that moment again, when you find out you haven't won a Fields Medal.

The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), held every four years, is in Philadelphia next week and you can watch with colleagues as we are streaming the opening ceremony in L3 from just before 2 p.m (when the medals are announced). As well as the Fields, there are other prestigious medals such as the Chern and the Abacus, so it's well worth a watch.

A leopard may not be able to change its spots, but a mathematician can.

One of the pleasures of Oxford is walking across to Port Meadow, open grassland unploughed for 4000 years where cows cool their cloven hooves in the River Thames (known as the Isis here in Oxford) and people wild swim alongside swans and geese. Idyllic (except for the hundreds of teenagers). But we're mathematicians, so we have other watery things on our mind.

Oxford Mathematician Josh Bull is in big trouble. He failed to heed the most important warning on social media for a mathematician: Don't try to be funny.

Algebra spoken in six different languages and a mathematical sing-along in a language spoken by over a billion people. The latest from the Tower of Babel.