Today I received three messages from Harvard.  The first, at 15:48, began:

Dear Prof. Trefethen,
With just 14 hours left before the end of Harvard’s fundraising year, please consider joining other members of the alumni community in making a gift at alumni.harvard.edu/givehcf.

The second, at 16:57, began:

FEATURED NEWS / JUNE 2015
Big Boost for Engineering and Applied Sciences.
John A. Paulson’s $400 million gift will fuel rapid growth.

The third arrived at 22:15 with the subject line

“Harvard Gift Strategies”

but I didn’t click the READ MORE button.

[30 June 2015]

SIAM journal articles have doubled in length in the course of my career.  At least this is true of the three SIAM journals I’ve checked, those on applied mathematics, numerical analysis, and scientific computing.

Opinions vary as to what has caused this expansion and whether it is good or bad.  Certainly the arrivals of TeX (1980s) and electronic publishing (1997) have helped enable the trend.  In my opinion the essence of the matter, however, is growing professionalization.  These days all i’s must be dotted, all t’s must be crossed, and all referees must be satisfied.  Clarity of writing, indeed clarity of thought, must compete against many other worthy concerns.  A light, clear 10-page paper is easily shot down.  A weighty 25-pager can withstand heavier ammunition.

[13 June 2015]

On average, about one new nation is created each year, and of course, each one needs a flag. Now that fluorescent fabrics are everywhere, enlarging our very concept of the set of possible colors, I wonder, will some new nation adopt a neon flag?

[14 April 2015]

George W. Bush.

(One was awarded to Al Gore for not being Bush, the other to Barack Obama for not being Bush.)

[22 March 2015]

Music is not poetry, tunes are not ideas,
nor are you, Alice Oswald,
Chopin or Mahler,
but this they have in common,
that I, of limited capacity,
wishing oh wishing I knew these sounds,
get next to nothing from hearing them cold
and write notes like this one as your voice fills the room,
looking earnestly up from my index cards
from time to time
to admire the performance.

[13 February 2015]

Almost all the novels ever written fall in one of four categories:

1st person singular, present tense (The Hunger Games)
1st person singular, past tense (Huckleberry Finn)
3rd person singular, present tense (One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest)
3rd person singular, past tense (For Whom the Bell Tolls)

Approximately what fractions fall in each?

This is just the kind of question a scientist embarking on a study of literature might begin with. The funny thing is, most literary scholars wouldn’t go near it. How unimaginative, how mechanical!

I confess I’d be glad to know the answer. So might some literary scholars, I imagine, though they might not confess it.

[2 July 2014]

Oxford, Cambridge and London, they say, form the golden triangle.

Now every mathematician knows the triangle inequality: the distance from A to C is no greater than the distance from A to B plus the distance from B to C.

The golden triangle, however, violates this principle. From Oxford to London takes an hour, and from Cambridge to London takes an hour, but from Oxford to Cambridge it’s three hours!

[28 February 2015]

It’s 10 below here in Banff, but when we ordered beers last night at the bar, they arrived North American style, ice cold. For good measure, the barmaid brought us each a glass of ice water too.

Having lived in America and Britain, I have experience of beer at all temperatures. The Americans are right: on a hot American summer’s day, cold beer is better. And the British are right: on a chilly English evening, warm beer is better.

Last night here in frozen Banff, cold beer felt pretty much insane.

But this is how cultures work. Nobody is going to serve beer Yankee-style on hot days and Brit-style on cold days. A culture makes its choice and sticks to it. This is another illustration of the “Who wears shorts in the Andrew Wiles Building?” principle.

[12 January 2015]

At the end of Little Clarendon Street one used to find the nicest video rental shop in Oxford, called “Movies”. But times change, and nobody rents videos any more. The shop closed. What would replace it?

Today I walked by and learned the answer: it is now a bookstore. But this is crazy! Books are much, much older than videos! If videos are out of date, then surely…?

Ah, no, for different processes unfold on different time scales. Videos were never older than decades; one could never have trusted them to last longer than decades. Books have been around for centuries and will be with us for centuries more.

[9 January 2015]

For three years I’ve been part of the “Cost of Knowledge” boycott, declining all requests to referee manuscripts for Elsevier journals. Their extortionate sales tactics extracted 826 million pounds profit last year, 39% of their gross income. Of course, Elsevier defends itself, producing statistics to show they are a public-spirited company whose only aim is (I quote their web site) to “enhance the performance of science, health, and technology professionals”.

Well, here is perhaps a hint of how much faith we can put in Elsevier’s statistics. I received an invitation recently, in fact two invitations, to a party at the Joint Mathematics Meetings:

“As a valued Referee for our journals in Mathematics and Statistics, we would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your efforts…. We are organizing a Referee Reception at the forthcoming Joint Mathematics Meeting,… where you will have the opportunity to meet and share ideas with fellow referees….”

So I am a “valued Referee”! — in fact, very likely, two of them. And I’m not alone. Tim Gowers, initiator of the boycott, also got an invitation.

[22 January 2015]