Category Archives: Uncategorized

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. This memorable quotation from Sir Isaac Newton, it has been speculated, was a subtle derogatory reference to the physical stature of his rival, Robert Hooke. Many derivative … Continue reading →

Interestingly, the first article on cp4space was concerned with Fourier series and pathological functions. Assuming you haven’t read it (which is plausible, since it precluded the early-2013 popularity surge), I suppose I should start by re-introducing them. Fourier reasoned that … Continue reading →

Suppose we have three semi-transparent light blue spheres, S1, S2 and S3, which are all externally tangent to each other. Then, we have a series of metallic green spheres, Γ0, Γ1, Γ2, Γ3, Γ4, Γ5, such that each one touches the … Continue reading →

The second round of the British Mathematical Olympiad was marked today; results are available from Joseph Myers’ website. Congratulations to everyone who featured on the leaderboard (especially Linden Ralph, who secured first place). Moreover, best of luck to the recently-appointed EGMO team of Olivia … Continue reading →

The second round of the British Mathematical Olympiad was taken yesterday, with the questions available online from Joseph Myers’ website. Results should be released shortly after marking, which takes place next Saturday. Recall that a Riemann surface is a complex 1-manifold, … Continue reading →

Suppose we have a circular track occupied by finitely many trains of various lengths travelling at the same speed. The trains collide elastically with each other. If the sum of the lengths of the trains is a rational multiple of … Continue reading →

As I’ve mentioned before, a snark is a 3-regular bridgeless graph which cannot have its edges 3-coloured such that each vertex is incident with one edge of each colour. One particular example is curiously named the Descartes snark, and is … Continue reading →

My favourite author, after whom I was named, is undoubtedly Douglas Adams. I particularly enjoyed Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (sadly, not quite as famous as his bestseller, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy), featuring a rather disorganised and slightly … Continue reading →

Quite a while ago in the Eagle pub in Cambridge, James Watson and Francis Crick announced the double-helix structure of DNA. This discovery was based on earlier X-ray diffraction experiments by Rosalind Franklin. In eukaryotic organisms such as ourselves, DNA has a linear … Continue reading →

It’s now New Year’s Eve, which is why the cp4space banner has changed again. As is usual for this time of year, there is a joint Anglo-Hungarian IMO training camp in Tata, Hungary. I’ve mentioned it before at the end of 2012, … Continue reading →