BAKED GOODS

  • Ida's Hirzebruch signature dish (baked on the occasion of the visit of Fritz Hirzebruch to Edinburgh in September 2010)
  • James W. Alexander was a great American topologist. It also happens to be the name of our Edinburgh plumbing and kitchen engineer. The Alexander horned giraffe is the New Yorker version of the Alexander horned sphere. The original 1924 article is here. Google has links to many images of an Alexander horned sphere.
  • Review in the September 2010 issue of the LMS Newsletter of the film Rites of Love and Math by Ed Frenkel and Reine Graves.
    Rob Kirby's review.
    Herve Lehning's review.
  • The Maslov index, the signature and bagels.
    Monsieur Benno und der mathematische Möbius-Bagel. Film made by Ursula Artmann of Benno A. slicing a bagel. Sad news: Benno Artmann died in October 2010.
    The original Möbius sliced bagel.
    Warning on the dangers of bagel slicing.
    Wikipedia article on bagels.
    Bagel story New Yorker cartoon.
    Mathematical food picnic.
    Keizo Ushio's sculptures, split tori and Mobius bands by N. A. Friedman and C. H. Sequin, Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, 1751-3480, Volume 1, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 47 - 57.
  • What do you do ... Article in Times Higher Education (11.12.2008). Cartoon by Cosgrove (Ian Stewart) first appeared in Manifold magazine in the 1970's.
  • The Atiyah-Singer Theorem Cake with a proof of the index theorem, designed by John Roe and baked by Ida Thompson for the 75th birthday of Michael Atiyah on 22nd April 2004 (who did not want the proof regarded as a piece of cake). The cake design has made it into a lecture by Mathai Vargese.
  • The baking of books (An illustration from "Worldly Goods" by Lisa Jardine).
  • The baking of knots The knot 8_6 was designed by Simon Willerton and baked by Ida Thompson (who also took the photo) on the occasion of Marc Lackenby's talk Unknotting operations to the Scottish Topology Seminar on 17th January, 1997. The unknotting operation was performed by all present, by eating the knot.
  • Mathematics applied to dressmaking by Sir Christopher Zeeman, Costume 28, 97-102 (1994). Google hits for "Zeeman dressmaking"
  • 2 St.Kilda women Photographs from With Nature and a Camera by Richard and Cherry Kearton, the grandfather and great-uncle of the knot theorist Cherry Kearton. The visit to St. Kilda took place in 1896.
  • The ventriloquist Terri Rogers (1937-1999) specialized in topology, the art of creating illusions with shapes.
  • Prof. A.C.Aitken of Edinburgh University performing a daring feat of mental arithmetic. I originally thought the photo was taken during one of Prof. Aitken's performances at the Empire Theatre (now the Festival Theatre) in Edinburgh. However, CWI in Amsterdam have confirmed that the photo was taken during the 1954 Amsterdam International Congress of Mathematicians, and that the MC is Wim Klein, another calculating wizard who performed in a music hall. Thanks to Robert Fountain for his help with this clarification.
    Prof. Walter Ledermann (Independent, Times obituaries) wrote (13.3.2003): I certainly attended Aitken's performances a few times, including the one where he wrote down the number `pi' to several hundreds of decimal places. He had prepared sheets of paper on which the number had been printed out; he handed these round the audience so that they could check his amazing feat on memory. He told me that students in London had invited him to give this show. But when he arrived in London having travelled by night train from Edinburgh, he was horrified to discover that he had left behind the packet of printed sheets. He quickly went to an office shop on Tottenham Court Road and asked the lady to do "some typing" for him. She declined saying that she was fully occupied at the moment. However, he pleaded, saying that it was most important to him and that all he wanted to have typed was "a number " . The lady relented and sat down at her typewriter. "What is this number ?" and Aitken began: "3.1415...."
  • Mathematical trail along the Royal Mile in Edinburgh
    (designed by John Searl, converted to electronic format by Jeremy Brookman)
  • Microcosmographia Academica
  • Gemini Kaleidoscopes
  • Decorative shingling with fiber cement. By Matthew Thompson
  • Graham Higman (1917-2008) Independent obituary (8.5.2008). The portrait of Higman hangs at the end of the Higman Room of the Oxford Mathematical Institute, opposite the blackboard: I once gave a talk there, on a dark winter afternoon, at the end of which I felt that the portrait was the most awake member of the audience. The Higman linearization trick introduced in the paper The units of group rings (Proc. L.M.S. (2) 46, 231--248 (1940)) and its subsequent generalizations are fundamental to the algebraic transversality pervading the algebraic K- and L-theory of infinite group rings: see for example my paper Algebraic and combinatorial codimension 1 transversality (2004).
  • Knitted goods. (9 June 2008)
  • Boons and blessings.