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Status Reports
Status: Mathematics (2023 - June)
(Text as at 06/07/2023 00:43:12)
As this project is substantially in abeyance, this report is mostly generated automatically, with minor textual additions at the end of each academic year.
Rationale for this Project
- This is rather an eccentric activity, partly an attempt to exorcise some ancient demon – the rather bruising experience of reading mathematics at King’s College Cambridge back in the mid 1970’s.
- However, any modern educated person should be reasonably up to date with the mathematical sciences, and statistical and probability theory are essential tools for evaluating evidence, and are useful in Bridge! If only advanced mathematics wasn’t such a difficult subject.
- This project is diverging from Mathematics per se to the Philosophy of Mathematics and other related subjects. For instance, Philosophy of Mathematics features in Philosophy of Religion by providing an analogy or model of the sort of necessary existence that God is supposed to have.
Summary of Progress during April - June 2023
- I spent 2.25 hours in 23Q2 on this Project, or related work (23.25 hours YTD, where for "YTD" - Year to Date - I mean the (academic) year that commenced in October 2022). That's 17.5% of the planned effort (59.8% YTD). Overall, 0.3% of my Project effort in the Quarter was directed towards this project (making 1.2% YTD) - as against 1.7% planned (1.9% YTD).
- Further details follow (for the latest Quarter: 23Q2):-
Mathematics (Total Hours = 2.25)
- Mathematics - Reading / Writing
- Mathematics - Admin
- In 23Q2 I scheduled 1 hour / week for this project but did virtually nothing.
Summary of Progress during October 2022 – Date (YTD Activity1)
- Mathematics (Total Hours = 23.25)
- Mathematics - Reading / Writing (Total Hours = 22)
- Mathematics - Admin (Total Hours = 1.25)
- 22Q3 Status Reports (0.25 hours)
- 22Q4 Status Reports (0.5 hours)
- 23Q1 Status Reports (0.25 hours)
- Looking into OU BA (0.25 hours)
→ See "Admin - Mathematics - Admin" (1.25 hours)
- As can be seen from the list above, this project remains mostly inactive.
- Progress (if any) in the current quarter can be obtained from the relevant section of my Summary Task List2, and YTD in the current & future “automatic” editions of this report.
Plans for the Near Future:
- Because of the need to focus on higher-priority projects, it is not realistically possible to schedule much time on this project. Indeed, I’ve not been able to schedule any time for the coming Quarter.
- If I do find the time, I’ll be looking into:-
- "Admin - Math Trainer": Try out
- Aeon3: Read papers as they arise.
- "Cummings (Jay) - Proofs: A Long-Form Mathematics Textbook": Read.
- "Gowers (Timothy), Barrow-Green (June) & Leader (Imre), Eds. - The Princeton Companion to Mathematics": Browse.
- "Ronan (Mark) - Symmetry and the Monster: The Story of One of the Greatest Quests of Mathematics": Read.
- "Polya (George), Stewart (Ian) - How to Solve IT: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method": Read.
- "Shapiro (Stewart) - Thinking about Mathematics - The Philosophy of Mathematics": Complete reading.
- "Smith (Martin) - Why Throwing 92 Heads in a Row Is Not Surprising": Analyze.
- "Spiegelhalter (David) - The Art of Statistics: Learning from Data": Re-read selected passages.
- Try the puzzles in
→ "Polya (George) & Kilpatrick (Jeremy) - The Stanford Mathematics Problem Book: With Hints and Solutions", and
→ "UKMT, du Sautoy (Marcus) - The Ultimate Mathematical Challenge".
- Trying out Math Trainer ("Admin - Math Trainer") seems a bit eccentric, but I’ve found that – as the time has passed – I’ve got lazier and lazier with mental arithmetic, and could do with perking up a bit. The App seems of some use.
Mathematical Resources
In-Page Footnotes:
Footnote 1:
- As this project is substantially inactive, I don’t usually update the text quarterly as for the active projects, but only at the end of the academic year.
- YTD figures and tasks are somewhat redundant at the end of the first Quarter, but it saves remembering to update the report in future quarters.
- However, while the Quarterly figures appear against that plan and are “as at” the end of the last Quarter, the YTD figures and tasks are as at the date of production of the report.
- The YTD Activity-list is to make the end-year task easier, and to give a clearer idea of what – if anything – has been going on in the interim.
Footnote 4:
- These are not left over from my Cambridge days as these few books were given away to my sister’s high-school in Gloucester by my mother during my brief sojourn with the Carthusians.
- Rather, I found them going cheap in bulk at a local second-hand bookshop.
- They are accessible via …this link.
Table of the Previous 12 Versions of this Note: (of 63)
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Parent Topic |
| 06/07/2023 00:43:12 |
517 (Status: Mathematics (2023 - June)) |
Status: Summary (2023 - June) |
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Text Colour Conventions
- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2023