Geeking Out

Just for the record - I am right now, at 8:23pm on April 9, 2016 sitting alone in a common room of the pure mathematics area of the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at Cambridge University while my host Dr. Bursill-Hall is working in his office with his graduate student Richard Chapling.  

This is an amazing privilege that I did not even dream of!  So I'm really geeking out and needing to record the moment!

Entrance and Library

Being shown the buildings - Applied Math on the Left, Pure Math on the Right

Undergraduate project from last year - model of a Menger Sponge fractal

The bust of Ramanujan that is facing me as I work

I also need to put up some images from today of my tour around Cambridge - simply because if I wait to caption these pictures I won't be able to keep it all straight - saw SO MUCH!

Of course, I wouldn't forget THIS; it's things further down the page that I might forget - chapels of many different colleges.  This is the famous King's College Chapel, as seen from the bell tower of Great St. Mary's.  You can see the University Library in the background (they have a name for the structure around here that I won't print), and you can see the "Old Buildings" on the right.

And it is tiny doors and tiny spiral staircases everywhere out here!  Well, at least in castles and cathedrals!

The Bells of Great St. Mary's, Cambridge

The following images are from the Caius (Gonville and Caius) College Chapel.

Actual Byzantine Mosaics Beyond the High Altar

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St. Bene't's Church, Cambridge - the oldest building in Cambridge, going back a millennium.

Pembroke College and Chapel.  This chapel is Christopher Wren's FIRST project.

Little St. Mary's - where George Washington's Uncle, Godfrey Washington was once vicar, and where we can see what may have been a precursor of our stars and stripes on his coat of arms.

And more pictures of Caius were my host was a student.  He told me about the gates here that you go through.  You enter through humility, continue into virtue, and exit into honor on your way to the senate building to receive your degree.  At the final gate he is showing me the height he should be if this were truly a Renaissance building (as done in Italy - rather than as done by copying from manuscripts of Renaissance buildings by English builders!)

POST SCRIPT:  After I finished my posting and other activities - arranging hundreds of pictures into folders and such - Richard, Piers and I had Chinese take-out at the CMS, and I was regaled with amazing stories of all sorts - everything from tales of Paul Dirac to the China of Mao Tse-tung  to the necessity of chalk to mathematics to Joseph Needham, whom I had not heard of before but have come to respect through the stories I heard today.

An evening to remember for sure!!