I feel I have always been taught just enough math to get by. Since I am by training a physicist and work in the area of medical imaging, that means that I have digested some amount of math, but I have come to realize that what I know mostly amounts...

Mathematicians use all sorts of evocative words and phrases to describe some of the fancy games they play with numbers and spatial constructs. A few posts back I quoted Penrose talking about fibre bundles, for example. This is supposed to bring to...

In the beginning was the hardware, although it wasn't much use without some software. And then, to spoil the Edenic harmony of Intel and Microsoft (I'm simplifying the history of computers a bit here!) there came the viruses and the worms, those evil...

Well I've been busy trying to make a start on some basem

So Bernie Madoff has pleaded guilty to a pretty massive investor defrauding scheme. Like Charles Ponzi, he started small, but as former chairman of NASDAQ, his fall in reputation has been rather greater. But was Madoff's truly a pyramid scheme?A pure...