Welcome to virtual Geoff Smith


You can find a diary connected with my 2009-10 first year undergraduate course on algebra, the racily named MA10209.
The only place in the UK where you can obtain my NEW BOOK is here: A Mathematical Olympiad Primer by Geoff Smith, but if you are very far away it is available from the Australian Mathematics Trust. Other BMO and IMO training manuals such as Plane Euclidean Geometry and and the similar book for Number Theory and Inequalities by Christopher Bradley are also available there, as is The Backbone of Pascal's Triangle by Martin Griffiths. At the same site you can get UKMT yearbooks and past BMO papers. These publications are all on a not-for-profit basis. A recent picture of me .......


Merry Christmas. Entertain and calibrate your guests and relatives with the Christmas Assessment Exercise.


My report on the 50th International Mathematical Olympiad in Germany is now available (scroll to the bottom).
Back to the title. What passes for the real thing is a Senior Lecturer in Mathematics at the University of Bath.

He has written and edited some books which you must purchase otherwise you will contract a horrible disfiguring disease (see picture). The most widely used is the steamy Introductory Mathematics: Algebra and Analysis which is aimed at people making the transition from school mathematics to university-style pure mathematics. I have also written scripts (and sometimes appeared in) DVDs aimed at people interested in maths competitions published by UKMT and Highperception.


He tries to prove theorems and these sometimes surface in his CV.

He is the leader The celebrated Microphone d'Or of the UK International Mathematical Olympiad team and is chair of the British Mathematical Olympiad.

He is he the current holder of the celebrated Microphone d'Or as the most garrulous juror of IMO 2009 in Germany.

He chairs the committee which administers Royal Institution Mathematics Masterclasses in Bath, Bristol and Swindon.

He administers the communications service Group Pub Forum for the Group Theory research community.

Have you got the wrong Geoff?


Artistic control feature

If the background colour of this document offends your eye, just change it to hangover green, Springer yellow, Gates blue, aorta red, bacteria or, for minimalists, Newgate's knocker.


Cantor's Frames

Read this sentence countably many times in uncountably many ways


Teaching pages:

Here is some applied stuff for people who like that sort of thing:

Snail Venom My colleague in our Chemistry Department Jonathon Cox writes "Some members of a group of marine snails known as cone snails (because of their shape) eat fish, which poses a problem: snails are slow and fish are fast, so how does a snail catch a fish? The solution is reasonably remarkable. The snail tags the fish with a harpoon made from a special hollow barbed tooth. The tooth is hollow because it contains a deadly poison which paralyses the fish instantaneously. The fish immobilised, the snail then engulfs it with a distensible stomach and proceeds to eat it alive."

"The snail's venom consists of peptides, small strings of amino acids, which are cross-linked by certain amino acids in the string known as cysteines. Two cysteines form a cross link. Typically the peptides contain 2, 4, 6 or 8 cysteines (i.e four cross links) and there are no more than 30 amino acids in a single peptide (and no less than 8). Cross-linking gives the peptide a specific shape which is then able to specifically interact with (and block) a nerve receptor of the complementary shape. Each different combination of cysteines gives rise to, by and large, a different peptide shape."

Here is a paper on how to mess with snail venom by S. J. Palmer, M. R. Redfern, GCS and J. P. L. Cox Sticky Egyptians: A technique for assembling genes encoding contrained peptides of variable length and some supporting mathematics.


Contact Information:

Dr Geoff Smith                         Email: G.C.Smith@bath.ac.uk
Department of Mathematical Sciences    Tel:   +44 (0)1225 386182 (direct)
University of Bath                     Fax:   +44 (0)1225 386492
Bath BA2 7AY
England 
The email address G.C.Smith@bath.ac.uk is the shiny new official University of Bath format, though once upon a time the shiny new format was masgcs@bath.ac.uk -- the one that people actually use is, of course, entirely different: gcs@maths.bath.ac.uk -- as far as I know, all these incantations work.

Whereabouts:


Club and Conferences:


Stop Press

Pictures are now available of the inside of my home PC here and here. Woodlice infested the box, and a spider set up a web to ensure a continuing lunch. When I tried to switch on the power after being away for three weeks, sparks flew and the air fizzed. The spider is nowhere to be found and is suspected to have committed suicide in the power unit.

The inside of the PC resembles both my office and home.

University Centre, Bath Mathematics People spivvy colleagues and the trouble and strife.