If you’re a stale pale male of a certain age and intellect, John Peel might at times have been the most important person in your life. Indeed, he may still be. He was the BBC disc-jockey who reigned as Britain’s musical arbiter elegantiarum from the late 1960s until his premature death early in the twentieth-first […]
If grovelling ever becomes an Olympic sport, Britain has a potential world-beater ready and waiting. He’s called Stephen Crabb, and he was a minister in David Cameron’s Tory government. Here he is displaying his skills before an appreciative audience at Finchley Synagogue in London: Israeli Independence Day: Work and Pensions Secretary Stephen Crabb leads UK […]
Was haben Schach und Pfauenfedern gemeinsam? In der Geschichte der Menschheit gab es auf eine derartige Frage lange Zeit keine vernünftige Antwort. Heute können wir antworten: „Sie können beide mit Hilfe eines Zweigs der Mathematik, nämlich die Spieltheorie, analysiert werden. Bei Spielen wie Schach geht es um Wettbewerb, um Strategien für mehr Erfolg und zur […]
I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of infallibility and the promise of certain knowledge. Singer Neil Young keeps on searching for a heart of gold. I keep on searching for certainty. Or rather: I search for more of it, because there is an infallible system of certain knowledge. It’s called mathematics and I think […]
What’s the connection between chess and peacock feathers? For most of human history, there was no sensible answer to a question like that. Today we can reply: “They can both be analysed using the branch of mathematics known as game theory.” Games like chess are about competition, about strategies for improving success and avoiding failure. […]
The Polish-Jewish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) was that rare thing: a sympathetic Marxist. Unlike Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and the feuding revolutionaries of our own day, she doesn’t seem to have fuelled her politics mainly on power-lust, egomania and hatred. She opposed Bolshevik tyranny and defended free speech with the classic line Freiheit ist immer Freiheit […]
Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dickens are perhaps the three central figures of English literature. Representing respectively poetry, drama and prose, they have been hugely influential for centuries, read, analysed and quoted by countless millions around the world in every language from English and Afrikaans to Hindi and Mandarin. Viral Vectors But in modern times all three […]
