Tag: Birthday

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Setting the scene for a series about my recent holiday in Scotland.

I usually have a short holiday around the time of my birthday. This year, due to the place my mother was able to organize for us to stay at only being available for a few days I had the main celebration yesterday and have spent most of today travelling. This post sets the scene for what will be a series of blog posts about my brief sojourn in Scotland.

GETTING THERE

We were staying at the Charles Rennie Mackintosh building in Comrie, which was one of that worthy’s earliest design projects. I arranged to travel by public transport between King’s Lynn and Perth, the nearest major town to Comrie. The public transport element of my outbound journey consisted of four stages: King’s Lynn to Peterborough by bus, Peterborough to Edinburgh Waverley by rail (an Azuma train, the new stock being used by LNER, with a very streamlined front), a Scotrail stopping train from Edinburgh Waverley to Stirling (ultimate destination Dunblane) and then a Scotrail intercity train from Stirling to Perth. By the time I reached Perth, where my parents were meeting me by car for the rest of the journey to Comrie I had been underway for just over eight hours, and another hour would pass before we reached our destination. I will be covering the public transport element of the journey in fuller detail in a later blog post but for the moment here is sampler gallery…

This frontage is in Wisbech, near the start of my journey.
Durham, in the middle of the journey (two pics)
Newcastle
Leaving England and heading into Scotland (this is Berwick, where the train did not stop)
This tower with the gold coloured ornamentation is near Linlithgow, nearing the end of the Edinburgh-Stirling leg of the journey.

THE HOUSE

I will be covering the house and its immediate surrounds in more detail later, but here are a few pictures to whet the appetite…

Everything in these three pictures is Mackintosh designed.

ACTIVITIES

As you might imagine the Tuesday evening was pretty much a dead loss as far as activities were concerned, but Wednesday and Thursday were well filled. I explored along the river Earn on the Wednesday morning, and we all walked up to the Deil’s Caldron just before lunch that day, before doing some of the Earthquake Walk in the afternoon (Comrie used to be known as the ‘shaky toon’ because of its proximity to a fault line, and was possibly the first place in the world to have earthquake recording equipment, with the house in which that equipment lived, and where there is a still a functioning seismoscope, being the centrepiece of the walk). On Thursday we visited a WWII POW camp at Cultybraggan, also had a look at an old Roman fort, and near the latter we also saw a much younger but still impressively old stone packhorse bridge across the Earn and also paid a visit to Crieff, once an important staging post on an epic cattle droving route that began in the extreme west of Scotland and ended in Stirling. The birthday meal was Thursday evening. Here is a sample gallery from some of these activities…

Three shots of the Caldron (the colour of the water is down to dissolved peat from the uplands – water in Scotland is not in the hands of greedy privateers).
A couple of items at Cultybraggan and the packhorse bridge.

THE RETURN JOURNEY

The public transport element of my return journey started with a journey from Perth to Edinburgh Waverley, not by way of Stirling, then the fast journey from Edinburgh Waverley to Peterborough and finally a bus from Peterborough to King’s Lynn. The train from Perth ran late, and there were moments of worry about making the interchange at Edinburgh (the train from Perth arrived only eight minutes before my second train, to Peterborough, was due to depart, but I hustled myself between platforms and in the end reached my seat with six of those eight minutes to spare. I haven’t yet edited the photos from I took en route. I end with a mini-gallery from earlier in the stay…

A stone bridge over the Earn, which we crossed on our way to the Earthquake House.
the Earthquake House from the road.

An Eulerian Birthday

A distinctive (I hope) way to mark the occasion of my 41st birthday.

INTRODUCTION

Today is my birthday, which is the last part of the title explained, so where does the word “Eulerian” come in?

THE MOST PROLIFIC OF ALL MATHEMATICIANS

For all his immense output Leonhard Euler (pronouned “Oiler”, not “Ewe-ler”) is best known to the world at large for his solution to the “Bridges of Konigsberg” conundrum. Citizens of this then German town (it is now Kaliningrad, Russia) used to amuse themselves by trying to walk around the town crossing each of its seven bridges once and once only in the course of their peregrinations. Nobody ever managed it, and Euler (pioneering the science of topology, a minor offshoot of which is the “Beck Map”, versions of which are now used worldwide as an easy way to display urban public transport routes, in the process) proved that there was no way to do this. This is because each the four landmasses involved contained an odd number of bridgeheads – had specifically two (and it could have been any two), or all four of these landmasses contained even numbers of bridgeheads it would have been possible to devise a walking route using each bridge precisely once.

Much less well known than the above, Euler also noticed that if you feed values into the equation Y = X2 + X + 41 every value of X from 0 through to 39 produces a prime number for Y, and even after the inevitable break to the sequence where X = 40 produces Y = 1681 = 41 * 41, and X = 41 produces Y = 1763 = 41 * 43, the formula continues to produce a very large number of prime numbers – far more than any other formula of similar type. This then is why I described this an Eulerian birthday – it is my 41st. A clue to bear in mind for next year’s birthday is that the person who will play the role in my blog post on that day that Euler has played today was proud of the fact that he was born in Cambridge in 1953 and had initials DNA. More details, including a full listing of the primes produced before X = 40, can be found in Keith Devlin’s “Mathematics: A New Golden Age”.

PICTURES

I have some pictures, mainly from today at work. These are presented as a ’tiled mosaic’ – click an individual image to view at full size.

From here to the Watt medallion are tokens that I scanned at high resolution and worked on to produce the clearest possible images.
These last few pics are not work pics – they are the best images I have managed to get of the James Watt medallion I bought recently.

AFTERWORD

Many people on both facebook and twitter have wished my a happy birthday and I thank all of you for so doing – the main celebration, a Sunday lunch at the Crown in East Rudham two days before the actual day was superb.