Anne-apolis

  I spent the whole of last week in a workshop with the Maths in Industry Study Group, a wonderful initiative where people from outside the Maths field are invited to pose problems that are set in the "real world" that lend themselves to a mathematical solution. I was invited, along with my colleague Dr Ryan Bradley, to present a problem based on a low-cost housing prototype that Ryan built in 2017 and has been monitoring ever since. The house is built of cement stabilised blocks, made from crushed recycled bricks, not just the walls, but most innovatively for the curved vaulted roofs. These follow a catenary shape (the shape of a hanging chain, but inverted) and the double vault has earned the small house the nickname of Big Mac, with its similarity to the MacDonalds logo. It is a double-storey building with living rooms on the ground floor and bedrooms above.  The problem we posed to the mathematicians was to model the heat flow through the vaults, as these should perform m...

 Welcome back to my blog in 2025! To celebrate the new year, instead of looking at new things, I wanted to share with you a refurbishment project that I have just completed. Forty years ago, my sister gave me two classic wooden deckchairs, with striking canvas seats in red, blue and yellow. These lasted for many years, but eventually, when the canvas had become rather worn and faded, I replaced it with plain white seats. In  a second refurbishment, they were transformed into beige stripes, but recently it was time to give them a new lease on life for relocation to my daughter's house. Stacked on my balcony for several years has been another chair frame passed on by a friend that I have never had time to refurbish, and in discussing my plans, another friend donated his old chair that he has not used in years. So with four chairs to renew, the first step was to remove the old canvas. Two of the chairs have the canvas fixed to the frame with blue tacks, which have to be very care...