Archive for the Biographical Category

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One Year in Sussex

Posted in Biographical, Brighton with tags , on February 1, 2014 by telescoper

Well, it’s the First of February which means it’s a year to the day since I started my current job as Head of the School of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Sussex, or MPS for short.

It’s been an eventful year, and not really like I expected. What I mean is that I knew it would be hard work, but the hardest bits were not the things I’d imagined. The first half of the year was primarily involved with appointing new staff to the School. All the interviews and other activities associated with that took up a huge amount of time but I think it all went well in the end. The number of full-time staff in MPS has increased by more than 50% over this time; from 15 to 23 in Mathematics (including 3 new Professors) and from 23 to 38 in Physics & Astronomy. The primary motivation for this is growth in student numbers: the number of undergraduates in Physics & Astronomy has doubled in the last three years or so, and this year we had our biggest ever intake of over 140 students.

All that wasn’t my doing, of course. The expansion of staff numbers was planned before I arrived, and the increase in student numbers is down to hard work by the admissions team.

I spent the latter part of last year involved with planning further expansion of our research activity as the contribution of MPS to the University’s Strategic Plan and am looking forward to turning that into reality over the next year or so.

I’ve tried to ensure that MPS is a friendly and open place for all staff and students, where everyone has a say and everyone feels valued. It’s not for me to say how well I’ve succeeded in that, but I’ll carry on trying.

I should mention some of the frustrations. One is that I became an academic in the first place because I enjoy both teaching and research. When I became Head of School here I found I had so many administrative duties that I had very little time for either of those activities. I got especially depressed about not being involved in teaching because I didn’t see how I could properly understand how things work in MPS without working at the coalface.

Against the advice of several colleagues I decided to teach a full module this year on Theoretical Physics to a class of about 50 students. It’s been a struggle to find the time to prepare everything, as I’m doing this for the first time, but I’ll persevere. Hopefully the students will bear with me while I get my act together. I’m very impressed with their engagement with the material so far, but then they have chosen the Theoretical Physics option so are obviously the intellectual elite of MPS; obviously, that’s my theorist’s bias speaking!

Oh, and in my spare time I grew a beard:

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I suppose that will have to do. I’ll be heading up to campus shortly to spend Saturday afternoon in the office. A Head of School’s work is never done..

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Breakfast with BIMM and Cake with MPS

Posted in Biographical, Education, Music with tags , on January 31, 2014 by telescoper

Another very busy day means I’ve almost reached the end of a very busy week. I spent this morning in a meeting with colleagues from the University of Sussex and representatives of the Brighton Institute for Modern Music (also known as BIMM), which focusses on courses intended to prepare students to work in some aspect of the popular music industry, including performing and songwriting as well as, e.g., management.

It’s one of the odd things about being a Head of School that you get invited to do strange things every now and again and this was one such occasion. The University of Sussex validates degree programmes for a number of education institutions, BIMM being one of them and it was my job to Chair a session this morning (at a location in central Brighton) that formed part of the validation process. We had some nice pastries for breakfast too.

Regular readers of this blog (both of them) will know that I’m not really up to date on popular beat combos so I wasn’t picked for this task for any music expertise; the idea was rather that being a complete ignoramus I could be an impartial Chair…

It was great to talk to have the chance to talk to some of the current BIMM students as well as the staff and one of the things that struck me was that although I work in a very different discipline, many of the educational challenges faced by the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences and BIMM are very similar. I can’t talk about the details we discussed, but it was a very friendly meeting and there was lots of constructive discussion.

That business concluded it was back up to Falmer for a quick lunch and a meeting about undergraduate admissions. And finally, because it’s the last Friday of the month it was time this afternoon for our monthly MPS cake event. This month’s cake had a vaguely mathematical theme and also raised the issue of the correct plural of the word conundrum:

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I thought it was appropriate to invite the Head of the Department of Mathematics, Miro Chlebik, to solve this particular conundrum by cutting the cake:

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The cake vanished pretty quickly thereafter.

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Methods of Images

Posted in Biographical, Cute Problems, Education with tags , , , , on January 29, 2014 by telescoper

I’ve had a very busy day today including giving a lecture on Electrostatics and the Method of Images and, in an unrelated lunch-hour activity, filing my tax return (and paying the requisite bill). The latter was the most emotionally draining.

With no time for a proper post, I thought I’d give some examples of the images produced by yesterday’s graduands, including some who used a particular approach called the Method of Selfies. Unfortunately some of these are spoiled by having a strange bearded person in the background.

But first you might like to try the following example using the actual Method of Images:

Given two parallel, grounded, infinite conducting planes a distance a apart, we place a charge +q between the plates, a distance x from one of them. What is the force on the charge?

This is, in fact, from Griffiths, David J. (2007) Introduction to Electrodynamics, 3rd Edition; Prentice Hall – Problem 3.35.

Solutions via the comments box as usual, please.

And now here are some of the official pictures from yesterday

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Remains of the Day

Posted in Biographical on January 27, 2014 by telescoper

Well, it’s been a very long day. I got up at 5am so I could try a travel experiment. Given my dislike for Victoria station I decided to take the scenic route to and from Cardiff for the weekend. That involves going from Brighton to Portsmouth (or Fratton to be precise), and then taking a train from there via Salisbury and Bath Spa. It takes about an hour longer than going via London, but I found it far less stressful. It’s also significantly cheaper, even for peak-time travel. And so it came to pass that I caught the 6.28 from Cardiff Central, and got to Falmer before lunch. Quite a pleasant journey, actually, although there were clear signs of recent flooding close to the track.

I have a lecture from 5pm until 6pm on Mondays this term, so Mondays are going to be long days whether or not I travel, especially because I’m teaching a new course and am only just keeping up with writing the lectures given all the other things I have to do as Head of School. Here’s a picture I took just before the lecture, the sun going down across wintry Falmer.

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Talking of which, tomorrow is the University of Sussex Winter Graduation Ceremony and I have to present the graduands from the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences. That means I’m going to have to spend the evening practicing some unfamiliar names, getting my posh clothes in order and (hopefully at some point) sleeping.

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Eleven Plus Forty Years On

Posted in Biographical, Education with tags , , , on January 23, 2014 by telescoper

Today is the fortieth anniversary of an important historical event. Well, no. It’s not actually. It is however the fortieth anniversary of an important event in my life or, as they say on Facebook, a life event on my timeline.

On January 23rd 1974 (in the middle of the “Three Day Week“), I arrived at the Royal Grammar School in Newcastle upon Tyne to take the Eleven Plus entrance examination. The RGS was basically a private school, but it operated under what was called the Direct Grant system, which meant that applicants who did well in the entrance examination could have their fees paid by the local authority. That was the only possibility for me to go to there, in fact, as there was no way my parents could have afforded the fees. It wasn’t my idea to go for the examination either. I would have been happy to go to the local comprehensive with my friends from Pendower Junior School and in any case thought I faced humiliation in the examination, as I’d had no preparation for it (unlike many of the more well-to-do applicants). Nevertheless, my parents insisted and I turned up on a cold Thursday morning to take the test.

I remember little about the examination, except that it comprised several papers including one on English comprehension and another on Arithmetic. I’d never sat an examination before and I do remember that I found the whole thing excruciatingly hard. I think I found the Arithmetic paper so difficult that I almost decided to get up and leave; I may even have cried. I left with a sense of relief that it was all over, and a certainty that I would not be going to the RGS.

Nevertheless, a short time later, in February I think, I was summoned for an interview which experience terrified me despite the fact that the staff involved were really very kind and friendly. I was very surprised to have got that far.

School PlaceSurprise turned to astonishment in March when the letter arrived (left) confirming that not only had I passed but I had been awarded the scholarship that I needed to allow me to go there. And before you ask why I kept the letter, I’ll admit that I also still have all my school reports from the RGS. Vanity is part of the reason, I suppose, but the other is to remind me of how lucky I’ve been with the opportunities that have come my way. I remain completely convinced that I got my place and scholarship as a result of some form of administrative error, but I vowed to make the best of the opportunity.

The UK education system has all changed (several times) since then, of course, and I often wonder how many youngsters far cleverer than me from working class backgrounds would nowadays have any chance of following a path like that which presented itself to me.

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Sayonara, Nagoya

Posted in Biographical on January 19, 2014 by telescoper

So here I am, then, in Nagoya Airport (also known as Central Japan International Airport). Managed to get here via subway and train on my own and in good time, so I’m sitting having a coffee in the terminal building and wondering whether to buy any over-priced tat in the Duty Free shops.

Nagoya Airport is on an artificial island, actually, which means that I can see water all around from the departure lounge.

It’s been a fascinating and enjoyable trip. I’d like to thank my host, Chiaki Hikage, for all his help and hospitality.

It’s just after 9am here, which means just after midnight back in Blighty. The flight to Frankfurt arrives at 15.30, which means the whole 12 hour trip will be in daylight. Could be a bit strange!

Looking out I see that the incoming flight has just arrived, at the same time as the one that brought me here, and right on schedule. Travelling by a combination of Japanese and German transport definitely seems an efficient choice!

Signing off now. Hopefully my next post will be from Brighton!

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Qualification Matters

Posted in Biographical, Education with tags , , , on January 18, 2014 by telescoper

Yesterday evening I had a very enjoyable dinner with a seminar speaker and group of students from the Kobayashi-Maskawa Institute at Nagoya University. On the way back to the guest house I’m staying in, at about 9.30pm, we passed a group of young kids in uniform apparently returning from school. I was told that they were students from a Junior High School (chūgaku) who had been studying late in preparation for an entrance examination to the (selective) Senior High Schools (kōtōgakkō). I was a bit surprised to see young teenagers putting in such long hours, but such behaviour seems quite normal here in Japan.

One of the things I have to get to grips with when I get back to the School of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Sussex on Monday is the annual admissions cycle. I have meetings in my calendar for next week about this, and we are hosting an applicant visit day on Saturday 25th January; we have of course already made offers to a large number of students based on their predicted grades at GCE A-level. This process is fraught with difficulties, not least because there some schools seem to over-predict the grades that their pupils achieve in order to maximise the chance of them getting into University. Predicted grades being rather unreliable, it would of course be fairer on all concerned to use actual grades, i.e. to defer university applications until after the A-level results come out, but that would be far too sensible so obviously will not happen in the United Kingdom. I’m actually quite sceptical of the usefulness of A-levels for preparing students for University in general, but that’s another matter.

Anyway, the mini-rant above isn’t main point of this post, which is instead to issue a warning to those  students taking A-levels later this year. It is  based on anecdotal evidence, but quite a lot thereof. The point is that universities will often reduce their usual offer at A-level when they find an applicant with very high predicted grades, sometimes even making an unconditional offer (actually the minimum is two E grades) to high-fliers. This happened a lot in the old days when I was applying for a place at university. Though it is less common nowadays the government’s policy of lifting controls on universities’ ability to recruit students with three A-level grades at ABB or better is bound to increase the amount of game-playing as competition between recruiters intensifies.

This creates a number of issues, but the one I want to pick out arises when a student is predicted to get three As at A-level, but his/her first-choice university gives them an unconditional offer. Their first reaction will obviously be “whoopee! I’ll accept that offer and, what’s more, I don’t need to fret too much about my summer examinations..”.

In fact I’ve known plenty of students who came into university with quite modest A-level grades, but did brilliantly well at their studies and ended up with first-class degrees. There can be many explanations behind such cases quite apart from the relaxation effect. Some schools don’t have good specialist science teachers, for example; this can mean that a student’s interest is really only ignited once they get into university.

The problem is, though, that A-levels results are not just for university entry, they’re for life. A student may graduate with a good degree, even a First,  but so do many others. When selecting for postgraduate jobs, or even postgraduate study, recruiters often have a large number of people with excellent degrees; that’s an obvious consequence of the expansion of the Higher Education sector in recent years. What happens, therefore, is that employers and PG admissions tutors have to look at other factors; naturally, that includes A-level results but also even GCSEs. You might be surprised to learn that even if you get a first-class degree, your chances of getting a PhD place at a top institution depends on your performance at School but they definitely do. I’m not saying that this should, be the case, just that it in practice it is.

I recall hearing recently from one former student who had a first-class degree in Physics and a PhD from an excellent University, and who was applying for a job in a research institute (not in the university sector). The application form he received asked him to list not only his A-levels but also his GCSE results!

I hope I’ve made my point to any prospective students, but I’ll summarize it in case I haven’t. If you get a generous offer from your chosen university then that’s a good thing, because it means that they want you. You should be happy. But don’t ease off on your studies because if you end up getting poorer A-levels than you deserve, they may one day come back to haunt you.

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For the sake of a seminar..

Posted in Biographical, Books, Talks and Reviews, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on January 17, 2014 by telescoper

Just a quick post while I drink my morning coffee. Yesterday afternoon I gave a seminar here in the Kobayashi-Maskawa Institute at Nagoya University. It was actually at 5pm; I almost made a mistake when I saw it on the the high-tech digital display screen shown here (see top right) because I thought that 16 meant 1600 hours:

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Although I’ve got used to the time difference pretty well, I am still struggling to work out what day it is. The 16 stands for 16th January of course…

Anyway, it seemed to go fairly well and was pretty well attended by the students and postdocs as well as faculty. The lecture theatre was extremely well equipped with AV equipment and I got distracted quite often playing with the various gadgets. Also there were two projector screens, side by side, so the audience got my slides in stereo, so to speak.

In case you’re interested, here are the slides from my talk – complete with artistic flourishes:

For the cosmologists among you, the main protagonists here are Naoshi Sugiyama, who has a joint appointment here and at the Kavli Institute in Tokyo, Takahiko Matsubara, and Chiaki Hikage. The latter was a postdoc working with me at Nottingham and Cardiff; he then worked in Princeton before returning to Japan; Chiaki has been my host during my stay here.

After my talk, and a question-and-answer session, the staff treated me to dinner. We had some discussion about where to go during which I mentioned that I’d seen a place called Hamakin, which claimed to be a Japanese-Italian restaurant:

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I wasn’t convinced by the concept but it turned out that, although it was a new place, Takahiko had been there before and thought it was very good. We ended up there and, much to my surprise, it was excellent. It was a lot more Japanese than Italian, I have to say, but we did try an interesting take on pizza with cod roe as part of the topping. They had an English menu, with some curious choices of English words. I wasn’t really tempted by “Economic Steak”, and “Cod Ovum” suggested, by use of the Latin singular of “egg”, an extremely small portion. I still don’t know what “pastured chicken” is, either.

As a special treat some sake from a bamboo container was served for me in a bamboo cup; the bamboo is supposed to make it taste nicer but I wasn’t able to discern a difference between the special sake and normal sake. I clearly don’t have a sufficiently cultivated palate. Apologies for the pun in the title of the post too!

Today, Friday, is the last working day of my visit so I’d better get on and finish what I’m here to do because there’s another seminar this afternoon which I’d like to attend. Tomorrow, if I can get myself organized, I might take a trip on the bullet train for a day’s sightseeing in Kyoto, which I am told is a must-see city.

Toodle-pip!

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Living in the Vortices of Infinity

Posted in Biographical, Literature, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on January 16, 2014 by telescoper

As a boyhood fan of influential American horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft (known to his friends as “H.P.”), I was dismayed to discover some time ago a poem which revealed his obnoxiously racist attitudes. I always find it difficult knowing what to do when someone whose artistic work you admire turns out to have a dark side to his or her personality. It’s always hard to separate the creation from the creator. In the case of H.P. Lovecraft I’ve maintained an interest in him and his work, I suppose in an attempt to find some redeeming features.

Anyway, in Lovecraft’s Selected Letters, I came across a passage which is reminiscent of the following quotation from an interview with physicist Steven Weinberg:

I believe that there is no point in the universe that can be discovered by the methods of science. I believe that what we have found so far, an impersonal universe in which it is not particularly directed toward human beings is what we are going to continue to find. And that when we find the ultimate laws of nature they will have a chilling, cold impersonal quality about them.

I don’t think this means [however] there’s no point to life. Usually the remark is quoted just as it stands. But if anyone read the next paragraph, they would see that I went on to say that if there is no point in the universe that we discover by the methods of science, there is a point that we can give the universe by the way we live, by loving each other, by discovering things about nature, by creating works of art. And that — in a way, although we are not the stars in a cosmic drama, if the only drama we’re starring in is one that we are making up as we go along, it is not entirely ignoble that faced with this unloving, impersonal universe we make a little island of warmth and love and science and art for ourselves. That’s not an entirely despicable role for us to play.

This is the passage in Lovecraft’s Selected Letters

As you are aware, I have never been able to soothe myself with the sugary delusions of religion; for these things stand convicted of the utmost absurdity in light of modern scientific knowledge. With Nietzsche, I have been forced to confess that mankind as a whole has no goal or purpose whatsoever, but is a mere superfluous speck in the unfathomable vortices of infinity and eternity. Accordingly, I have hardly been able to experience anything which one could call real happiness; or to take as vital an interest in human affairs as can one who still retains the hallucination of a “great purpose” in the general plan of terrestrial life. … However, I have never permitted these circumstances to react upon my daily life; for it is obvious that although I have “nothing to live for”, I certainly have just as much as any other of the insignificant bacteria called human beings. I have thus been content to observe the phenomena about me with something like objective interest, and to feel a certain tranquillity which comes from perfect acceptance of my place as an inconsequential atom. In ceasing to care about most things, I have likewise ceased to suffer in many ways. There is a real restfulness in the scientific conviction that nothing matters very much; that the only legitimate aim of humanity is to minimise acute suffering for the majority, and to derive whatever satisfaction is derivable from the exercise of the mind in the pursuit of truth (from Letter to Reinhardt Kleiner  (14 September 1919), in Selected Letters I, 1911-1924 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 86-87).

I think my own philosophy of life is some sort of juxtaposition of these two…

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Home-thoughts from Abroad

Posted in Biographical with tags , , , on January 15, 2014 by telescoper

So here I am, about half-way through my trip to Japan and more-or-less getting the hang of life here. I have to admit that when I was a bit apprehensive ahead of my arrival because various friends back home had warned me that everyday things, particularly food, would be quite difficult to get used to in such a different culture; one even advised me to put plenty of sachets of Cup-a-Soup in my luggage in case I couldn’t find anything edible. As it turns out I’ve taken to the food rather well. First night here we had a traditional meal with various forms of Sashimi, which I liked very much indeed. At the weekend I went to a different kind of traditional eating-place and ate a hearty and very filling lunch of roast pork. The staff and other diners at this second place were quite surprised to see a European person there; they were impeccably polite, but clearly found it hilarious to see a middle-aged man struggling so much with his chopsticks. It occurred to me that they probably thought that only a barbarian could be such a messy eater. The food, however, was delicious.

Being conspicuous is something I’ve had to get used to. Although Nagoya is quite a large city, it’s not really a prime tourist location and there are not many Europeans to be found. There are numerous shops and eating places on the Nagoya University campus in which the clientele is overwhelmingly local; I always feel that I stick out like a sore thumb when I walk in. I can’t read a word of Japanese either, which means I have to point at the menu and hope that there are no options because that would require a question to be asked and answered. Today at lunch in one of the University Dining Halls I didn’t know how to answer a question and ended up with a side order of chips by default. They probably assumed that’s what I wanted, but in fact I’d have been happy trying something a little more exotic.

People don’t seem to eat any kind of dessert here, at either lunch or dinner. There are several pleasant coffee bars that serve good quality coffee near us, and there’s also a Starbucks. Also, people never tip in restaurants: you pay at the door on the way out, rather than at the table.

Supermarkets are interesting too. Most products have only Japanese writing on them so guesswork is often involved in figuring out the ingredients. Only rarely is there any English writing. Sometimes there’s a picture, but it doesn’t always help. I bought a bag of crisps the other day but had no idea what flavour they would be. After eating them I still haven’t a clue. Tasty though.

A small convenience store near the department sells pastries and the like so that’s what I’m having for breakfast these days. There’s a small water boiler in my room so I can make tea or (instant) coffee there; green tea is provided in the room. I bought some allegedly English (“black”) tea in a supermarket the other day, but sadly it turned out to be revolting. Perhaps I’ll bring it home with me and give it to someone I don’t like.

Generally food is pretty cheap: you can get a substantial meal in a reasonable restaurant for less than the equivalent of £10; items in supermarkets where I’ve been able to make a comparison are about 2/3 of the price you would pay in Britain. Come to think of it that’s probably less to do with Japan being cheap and more to do with Britain being expensive.

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Selfie, with Yukata

Among the items provided in my room is a Yukata, a simple cotton robe with wide sleeves worn with an obi (belt). I decided to try mine on and the result is shown on the left. Unfortunately I broke the symmetry incorrectly: one is supposed to wrap the left side over the right, whereas I did it right over left. The way I did it is apparently the way a body is dressed for burial. At least it looks right correct in the mirror.

Incidentally, the Japanese also drive on the right side of the road, ie the left.

The Yukata is extremely comfortable, and is often worn outdoors during the summer months or so I’m told. It’s too chilly in Nagoya at this time of year to go out wearing one, but it’s fine for indoors.
And before you ask, that’s not a telephone by the mirror but a hair-dryer…

During the days I’ve been busy getting on with work as well as talking a very great deal with some of the Doctoral and Masters students here at the Kobayashi-Maskawa Institute about their work. I think they relished the chance to practice speaking English as much as to get my input into the science. Anyway, the topics are very wide-ranging: higher-order perturbations to the Boltzmann Equation, analysis of Hα galaxy surveys, weak lensing in modified gravity theories, primordial magnetic fields, luminous red galaxies in clusters, analysis of 21cm surveys, etc.

 

A strange thought struck me walking to the office this morning. To me Japan is a foreign culture and I can’t speak a word of the language but, despite all that, I find it much easier to imagine living here than, say, America (where I can at least speak a similar language to the locals).  I’m not sure that this makes sense in terms of an explanation, but Japan seems to be a country that probably makes a lot of sense once you come to terms with it. I’m not saying that I want to move here, just that I feel a lot less alien here than I expected, and a lot less alien than I do in places much closer to home.

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