User:Gandalf61

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This user lives in the United Kingdom.

This user has a keen interest in mathematics.

This user drinks beer.

This user is a Doctor Who fan.

This user is a fan of Monty Python!

RD	This user knows that "they're all dead, Dave".

4	This user thinks BBC Radio 4 is worth the licence fee alone.

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(single-page edition)

1 Introduction
2 Motto of the day
3 Articles
- 3.1 2003
- 3.2 2004
- 3.3 2005
- 3.4 2006
- 3.5 2007
- 3.6 2008
4 Things I Have Learned From Wikipedia
5 To Do
6 BarnStars

[edit] Introduction

I very much welcome comments on any of my contributions (naming, format, style, contents, usefulness etc etc) - post a message at User_talk:Gandalf61.

As for myself ... I am British so I enjoy :

The outstanding comedy of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers
The animation of Nick Park
Singing along with Flanders & Swann
Eating Marmite on toast
Drinking dandelion and burdock and warm beer (but not both at the same time)
... and playing Diplomacy, Risk and, of course, Mornington Crescent

[edit] Motto of the day

Today's motto...
If Wikipedia has a lot of errors, so does every book I've read.

[edit] Articles

Articles that I have started or made a substantial contribution to include :

[edit] 2003

Abstract structure - a gap that needed filling because there was a link to it from the mathematics page
Proof by exhaustion - an important method of mathematical proof that has some controversial applications
Constructive proof - a complement to the nonconstructive proof article, and completes a link from mathematical proof
Generating function - replaced a redirect to formal power series with an article on different types of generating functions and their uses
Farey sequence - just couldn't resist filling out the previous stub
Ford circle - a natural link from Farey sequence
Kepler conjecture - a fascinating problem, and an example of proof by exhaustion
Sphere packing - a requested article that provides context for the Kepler conjecture
Mathematics as a language - completes a link from mathematical proof
Flanders and Swann - expanded previous stub
Polydivisible number - an intriguing backwater in recreational mathematics
Octave Chanute - American railroad engineer and aviation pioneer
Coniston Water - scene of Donald Campbell's death in 1967

[edit] 2004

Abstraction (mathematics) - link from abstract structure
Riemann hypothesis - added history section
St. Elsewhere - new article
Modular group - expanded existing article
Fractal - added history section
Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture - added background section and expanded rest of article
Julia set - amended general definition of Julia set
Fatou set - new article, link from Julia set
Lucas sequence - new article, link from Fibonacci pseudoprime
Disquisitiones Arithmeticae - new article, link from Carl Friedrich Gauss and number theory
Vorlesungen über Zahlentheorie - new article, link from number theory
Mathematical beauty - re-write of existing article
Mathematics and art - split out from mathematical beauty
How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension - new article, link from fractal
Voronoi diagram - added history section
Project Excelsior - new article, link from Joseph Kittinger
Pendine Sands - new article, written because I went there on holiday
K'nex - expanded previous stub
Rare Earth hypothesis - made existing article less rhetorical, more NPOV
Evolving the Alien: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life - new article, book by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart
Moving average (finance) - a family of common technical analysis techniques that deserved their own article
Lyapunov fractal - expanded previous stub
Apollonian gasket - new article on a very beautiful fractal
Benoît Mandelbrot - expanded existing article
Lévy C curve - new article, link from fractal
Lévy flight - expanded previous stub
Lévy's constant - new article
Paul Pierre Lévy - expanded previous stub
Ruth Lawrence - expanded previous stub
Notes & Queries - new article celebrating 15th anniversary of column in The Guardian

[edit] 2005

Zeckendorf's theorem - new article, referenced in Fibonacci number
Edouard Zeckendorf - new article
Mathematics education - re-wrote and expanded previous stub
A Mathematician's Apology - expanded previous stub
Hans von Mangoldt - new article
von Mangoldt function - example of an arithmetic function that is neither multiplicative nor additive
Padovan sequence - new article
Plastic number - re-wrote previous stub
Dyadic transformation - re-wrote previous stub
Tent map - expanded and re-wrote previous stub. Tent map exhibits a wide range of dynamic behaviours in a fairly simple context.
Poincaré-Bendixson theorem - new article
List of Cambridge mathematicians - extended previous stub list

[edit] 2006

Carmichael's theorem - replaced redirect
Midy's theorem - new article
p-adic number - re-wrote Introduction section and added references
trimorphic number - new article, extends concept of automorphic number
henagon and digon - expanded previous stubs
ideal triangle - new article, linked from hyperbolic triangle
A. Cohn's irreducibility criterion - expanded previous stub
Anderton Boat Lift - expanded previous stub; added diagrams
Regular Polytopes (book) - new article

[edit] 2007

Indra's Pearls (book) - new article
Graphical timeline of the Big Bang - made timeline consistent with times given in the individual early universe epoch articles, and wrote new article on the quark epoch
Multiplicative group of integers modulo n - added examples
Eulerian number - replaced incorrect redirect with new article
Peter Harrison Planetarium - expanded previous stub
Hofstadter sequence - new article
Integer relation algorithm - new article
Euclid's orchard - new article
Experimental mathematics - rewrote and expanded previous stub

[edit] 2008

Encyclopedia of Triangle Centers - new article
Coxeter's loxodromic sequence of tangent circles - new article
Cocker's Arithmetick - new article
Superperfect number - new article
Timeline of the future in forecasts - expanded and improved article when nominated for deletion
65536 (number) - expanded and improved article when nominated for deletion

[edit] Things I Have Learned From Wikipedia

To help me remember why I contribute to Wikipedia, this is a list (in no particular order) of things that I did not know until I read about them here.

A concrete canoe can resurface even after it is submerged.
The unknown soldier is not always unknown.
The Perpetual virginity of Mary is a doctrine of the Catholic Church.
The 3D equivalent of a Koch snowflake fills a cube.
Pica is a unit of measure in typography; the genus of the magpie; and the medical term for an appetite for non-foods.
An unpopped popcorn kernel is known as an "old maid".
The M96 motorway is not open to the public, but has appeared in a television documentary.
The Triangulum Galaxy is probably the furtherest object visible with the naked eye. It is about 400,000 light years further away than the Andromeda Galaxy.
A square wheel can give a smooth ride on a bumpy road.
Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, read mathematics at Trinity College, Dublin, and graduated with honours.
The gravitational sphere of influence of one body that is in orbit around another larger body is known as its Hill sphere.
In addition to Charon, Pluto has two other moons, called Nix and Hydra.
A crime commited by an astronaut on the International Space Station would fall under the jurisdiction of the home country of the alleged perpetrator.
Salvador Dali's last painting, The Swallow's Tail, is about catastrophe theory.
The Danjon scale is used to measure the visbility of the Moon during a total lunar eclipse.
In medieval Europe, the barnacle goose was believed to be born from a barnacle. This allowed Catholics to eat it during Lent, as it was classified as a fish.
Ingesting silver or silver compounds can turn your skin blue - a condition known as argyria.
Mountbatten pink, used as naval camouflage paint by Louis Mountbatten in World War II, is a mixture of medium gray with a small amount of Venetian red.
The inventor of mass-produced instant coffee was called George Washington.
Harriet Quimby, the first woman to earn a US pilot's certificate, became the first woman to fly across the English Channel less than a year later.
A desire line is a path created by people repeatedly taking the same route across an open space such as a field or lawn.
Bulwarks built around the piers of a bridge to ease the flow of water and reduce erosion are called starlings.
Bismuth and silicon each has the unusual property that its liquid phase is denser than its solid phase (like water).
Keraunomedicine is the medical study of lightning casualties; keraunos is Greek for "thunder" or "thunderbolt".
In her 2005 album Aerial, Kate Bush sings the first 137 digits of the decimal expansion of π (omitting digits 79 to 100).
The study of flags is called vexillology, from vexillum, a type of flag carried by Roman legions.
Despite having a very similar diet to cows, kangaroos produce virtually no methane from digestion.
Cummingtonite, named after Cummington, Massachusetts, is a mineral composed of magnesium iron silicate hydroxide.
The Boomerang Nebula has a temperature of 1K (i.e. colder than the CMB) and is the coldest known natural environment.
September 19th is International Talk Like a Pirate Day.
Bicycle Day (April 19th, 1943) is the day when Dr Albert Hofmann first intentionally ingested LSD in a self-experiment.
The Toast of Botswana is a naturally-occuring sheep-goat hybrid.
In American slang, "going postal" means "to suddenly become extremely and uncontrollably angry, possibly to the point of violence".
Charles Osborne hiccupped continuously for 68 years, from 1922 to 1990.
The Feynman Point is the sequence of six 9s which begins at the 762nd decimal place of π.
Stigler's law of eponymy states that "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer". Stephen Stigler first published the law, but attributed its discovery to Robert K. Merton.
The highest unclimbed mountain in the world is Gangkhar Puensum in Bhutan. At present, mountaineering is prohibited in Bhutan.
In 1907 Dr. Duncan MacDougall weighed six of his patients while they were dying in order to determine the weight of the human soul, which he estimated to be 21 grams.
A spite house is an American term for an often impractical building constructed to annoy or aggravate the owner of a neighbouring property.
February had 30 days in 1712 in Sweden, when two leap days were introduced to re-align the Swedish calendar with the Julian calendar. Sweden did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1753.
Exoteric is the opposite of esoteric - so public or common knowledge is exoteric knowledge.
The word coach comes from the Hungarian village of Kocs, where steel-sprung horse-drawn carriages were first built in the 15th century.
A trompe is a water-powered air compressor commonly used before electric-powered compressors became available.

[edit] To Do

Create/expand history sections in following articles : hyperbolic geometry, quadratic reciprocity, prime number theorem, Euler-Mascheroni constant ...

Write articles on world water speed record, Bluebird (car) and Bluebird (boat)

[edit] BarnStars

		The Working Man's Barnstar
		For your tireless and helpful work in the Reference desks. Jones2 10:55, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

		The Reference Desk Barnstar
		Thank you for your reply to my query at the Science Reference Desk regarding the History of Quantum Mechanics. Your contribution to the discussion was insightful, and helped me find the answers I was looking for. Thanks! FusionKnight (talk) 19:46, 22 January 2008 (UTC)