A month in, I am starting to produce my own d3 visualisations essentially from scratch. This example is an interactive version of Figure 2.4 from The Registrar General’s Annual Review of Demographic Trends (158th Edition). The user can select from many more years, but as only one is shown at a time clutter is reduced …
For the dissertation component of my MSc I’ll be working with the National Records of Scotland on a project entitled Data Visualisation of Scottish Demographic Information. Here’s a first dip into the world of D3, lightly adapted from these examples of chord diagrams. The data shown are Migration flows between Council areas for 2011-12 (most …
Earlier in the year I participated in the building of a `Giant 4D Buckyball’ sculpture; the first of its kind in the UK, and assembled by a team of twenty during the opening day of the University of Edinburgh’s Innovative Learning Week. I then represented the project at the ASCUS Art and Science Salon as …
In the previous post we saw how we could project polyhedra into the plane, and use some simple properties about planar graphs to classify all the possible Platonic solids. In this post we’ll finally get to the buckyball, by considering a less restrictive class of polyhedra: the fullerenes. The Platonic solids were extremely regular: every …
Continue reading ‘What is a buckyball? Part 3: Fullerenes’ »
How can we represent a 3-dimensional object such a cube in only 2-dimensions, such as on a flat piece of paper? This is the problem of projection, and it inevitably introduces inaccuracies. Different choices of perspective will alter what features survive the projection process. For instance, a perfect cube has all faces square, with corner …
Continue reading ‘What is a Buckyball? Part 2: Projection’ »
Earlier this year I was involved with the construction of the `Giant 4D Buckyball‘, as part of the University of Edinburgh’s Innovative Learning Week. The sculpture was actually of something rather more complicated – the Cantitruncated 600-cell – but buckyballs (in various representations) were a fundamental building block. So, what exactly are they? Julia’s description …
Continue reading ‘What is a Buckyball? Part 1: Planar Graphs’ »
Some of my work will once again be included in the art exhibition at the Joint Mathematics Meetings– a selection of stills from my video project x<–>t, which I described on my main site here. The image above is a more recent rendering using the same ‘strip photography’ technique: it captures the changing behaviour through …
Continue reading ‘2014 Joint Mathematics Meetings Art Exhibition’ »
For the 2013/14 academic year I’ll be back at the University of Edinburgh, to take part in the Operational Research MSc. This page will track my progress through the course!
Earlier today I spotted this video, featuring the stand-up mathematician Matt Parker and all-round interesting person Tom Scott exploring some oddities of the tube: Matt’s ability to beat Tom around the network depended on local knowledge of hidden shortcuts. You might wonder why these quicker options aren’t indicated by signs, but as they explain in …
Continue reading ‘The benign dictatorship of the London Underground’ »
My third paper on the Mahler measure problem has been accepted by the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, and is available here freely under the E-JC’s open access policy. This is joint work with Gary Greaves, and completes the proof of Lehmer’s conjecture for matrices with entries from rings of integers of quadratic extensions: a project …