Mathblogging.org — the Blog€¦ · Today: Peter Cameron ... When did you start blogging? Why did you start? I will answer these three questions together, since it is all the same

Mathblogging.org — the Blog

Mathematical Instruments: Peter Cameron’s Blog

November 24, 2012 § 2 Comments

Mathematical Instruments.

(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:One_of_Diamonds_Mathematical_instruments_1702.jpg)

via Wikimedia Commons

This post is part of the series Mathematical Instruments (http://mathblogging.wordpress.com/category/mathematical-instruments/) in which we introduce you to some of the math bloggers listed on our site.Today:

Peter Cameron

Mathematical Instruments: Peter Cameron’s Blog « Mat... http://mathblogging.wordpress.com/2012/11/24/peter-c...

1 of 5 21/01/13 12:15

Wha t’s yo ur bl og’s nam e? An y other p laces (T witter, Goo gle+, Fa ceb ook etc) w e can fin d yo u on ?

The blog is unimaginatively named “Peter Cameron’s Blog(http://cameroncounts.wordpress.com/)“, but I use the name Cameron Counts, taken from anovel by Richard Brautigan, “The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western”, one of whose heroes wascalled Cameron. His trademark was counting things.

I don’t do Twitter etc.; I am on Facebook only because I wanted to comment on something andfound I had to join and then couldn’t unjoin. I never go there! I am a bit of a technophobe really: atmy age, I don’t have to apologise for this. I do run another blog, qmdiscrete.wordpress.com(http://qmdiscrete.wordpress.com/), for the Centre for Discrete Mathematics at my university;and I have a personal web page which has some features of a blog (such as a “photo of the month”taken on one of my walks) at www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/~pjc (http://www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/~pjc/).

Wou ld y ou tell u s a little bi t m ore a bou t y oursel f? E.g., Wh ere are you com in g from ( bothgeograph icall y an d ph ilo so phi ca lly )? What is y our (scientifi c) ba ck gro und ?

I’m Australian, but moved to Britain when I was 21, and am still here at the age of 65. So I am achild of the 1960s, and have kept the liberal attitude that goes with that.

I have lived in East London for the last fifteen years, quite close to where I work. This is anexcellent place to live: a vibrant urban community, and with excellent transport links for when Iwant to get away (as, for example, when the Olympic Games were on earlier this year).

I am the sort of mathematician who is not good at delving deep; I would rather find unexpectedconnections between apparently unrelated fields. One of my most cited papers connected up rootsystems (from the theory of Lie algebras) with graph spectra.

If you divide mathematicians into discrete and continuous (prickly or gooey, as Alan Watts said), Iam definitely on the discrete side.

When a nd h ow d id y ou f irst di scov er ma th em atical b lo gs? Wh en did you start b lo gging? Why didyou start?

I will answer these three questions together, since it is all the same story. A few years ago theLondon Mathematical Society was in the middle of a heated debate over whether to merge with theInstitute of Mathematics and its Applications. A group of mathematicians I respected were runninga blog in support of one side of the debate; when things turned nasty and lawyers were called in,they (as officers of the society) had to take their hands off, and asked me to take over as anadministrator of the blog. This was all entirely new to me, so I thought I would start up my ownblog first, so I could make my mistakes in private. At that stage, I really had no idea what a blogwas.

Of course, I found that it was quite addictive, and was a good way of letting off steam when thebosses had done something that really annoyed me, by having a public rant about it; so I have justkept going.

Wha t d o you write a bo ut?


2 of 5 21/01/13 12:15

More than half of what I write about is mathematics, mostly expository. If I discover a new piece ofmathematics, I want to tell people about it; but I like to do expositions aimed at non-specialists,such as a series of a dozen posts about the symmetric groups. I find that these are among the mostpopular and long-lived of my posts; there is often one of the symmetric group series among my topten.

As well as that, I write about the mechanics of teaching, the technology (one of my most popularposts was about how to use non-default LaTeX fonts in Beamer presentations), and the politics; andI am not averse to talking about my hobbies, such as walking, music, and poetry, from time to time.

Wha t w oul dn’t hav e happ ened to you witho ut the in ternet?

Many things! One of the best things about the internet is that people I have never met, from all overthe world, get in touch. Often these contacts result in meetings, joint papers, or invitations. Butthere are several people far away who have commented on my blog, and I regard as friends, as faras you can be friends with someone you haven’t met.

For example, the tagline on my blog, “Always busy counting, doubting every figured guess”, is thestart of an abecedarian poem by JoAnne Growney; I get a warm feeling every time she posts acomment.

And there is no doubt that the internet makes mathematical collaboration much easier. I startedresearch in the days when it was necessary to exchange letters with people in America or Australia;the letter would take a week or two and probably cross with one from my collaborator, so workwas duplicated unnecessarily and everything went very slowly.

What does the internet need more of?

The problem with the internet is that content is growing faster than tools for dealing with it.Mathematicians need some permanence; our work doesn’t become obsolete for decades, maybecenturies if we are lucky. But if you search for a particular piece of content, recent papers tend tocome up; they are maybe at the end of a long chain of citations from the one I am looking for.

Of course the search box will find anything on my blog, but how do you know what to look for? Ihave a table of contents which is meant to help fill this gap.

Mathematicia ns on the w eb hav e…

Most importantly, the arXiv (http://arxiv.org/archive/math). All the current debate aboutopen-access and author-pays are largely irrelevant to mathematicians, since most recent papers Iam looking for will be there.

It is a little hard to believe that in the early days of the web, not much more than 20 years ago,mathematicians were in the forefront of using it!

Yo ur dai ly w eb rea din g (ma th em atical o r o therwise):

I have three sites I look at regularly:

Astronomy Picture of the Day (http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/) (a feast for the eyes)


3 of 5 21/01/13 12:15

Diamond Geezer (diamondgeezer.blogspot.com) (a blogger who lives just down the road fromme, and knows everything about what is going on in our part of London)XKCD (http://www.xkcd.com/) (another person I am sure I would get on with if we ever met)

(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/)Mathblogging.org — The Blog by mathblogging.org is licensed under a Creative CommonsAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.mathblogging.org(http://www.mathblogging.org).

Tagged:Mathematical Instruments, Peter Cameron

§ 2 Responses to Mathematical Instruments: Peter

Cameron’s Blog

An interview | Peter Cameron's Blog (http://cameroncounts.wordpress.com/2012/11/30/an-interview/)says:November 30, 2012 at 12:01 pm (http://mathblogging.wordpress.com/2012/11/24/peter-camerons-blog/#comment-977)[...] Mathblogging.org are doing interviews with mathematical bloggers. My turn came up; theresult is here. [...]

Reply (/2012/11/24/peter-camerons-blog/?replytocom=977#respond)

Ralph Dratman says:November 30, 2012 at 6:21 pm (http://mathblogging.wordpress.com/2012/11/24/peter-camerons-blog/#comment-979)Wonderful interview!

Reply (/2012/11/24/peter-camerons-blog/?replytocom=979#respond)

Blog at WordPress.com.

Theme: Oulipo by A. Mignolo.

Follow

Follow “Mathblogging.org -- the Blog”


4 of 5 21/01/13 12:15

Powered by WordPress.com


5 of 5 21/01/13 12:15

Documents

Mathblogging.org — the Blog€¦ · Today: Peter Cameron ... When did you start blogging? Why did you start? I will answer these three questions together, since it is all the same