About

This is a blog about the eternal comprehensibility of beauty. Just one form of beauty, but an eternal and under-appreciated one: mathematics.

Why is mathematics so useful for describing the universe? Why does the universe admit description at all? What kind of a language is mathematics, and what can it tell us about the limitations of our natural human languages? Why are many people shy of mathematics, and how can educators solve this problem? What does creativity mean for mathematicians and students? Such questions underpin my working life, in which I apply mathematics to the natural world and wonder why I can do it, and in my personal life when I worry about the gap between what we think we know and what reason tells us we know. I am also lucky enough to be paid for teaching and writing about mathematics.