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1973 |
BA, University of Cambridge (First in Theoretical Physics) |
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1974 |
Part III Maths, University of Cambridge (Distinction) |
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1977 |
MA, University of Cambridge |
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1978 |
PhD, University of Bristol |
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1999 |
“European Computer Driving Licence” |
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1977–1979 |
Research Assistant, University of Bristol |
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1979–1989 |
Lecturer, Queen Mary and Westfield College |
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1989– |
Reader, Queen Mary and Westfield College |
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1980–1982 |
Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow, University of Tübingen (visiting occasionally for a total of one year) |
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1983–1984 |
Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow and Visiting Professor of Physics, University of Tübingen |
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1992–1993 |
Visiting Researcher, Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil |
My academic activity since I returned from Brazil in 1993.
Lecture courses:
PG: Advanced Mathematical Computation, until 1994
UG: Computational Mathematics II, 1994–2000
In 1993 I designed a new first-year course Computational Mathematics II, which I have taught ever since. This marked our change from FORTRAN to Maple as our main language for teaching UG computing. The course introduces the computer programming concepts of data and control structures to Mathematics students, but also includes a brief introduction to numerical computing and computer graphics in two and three dimensions. I try to illustrate the main aspects of Maple as a system for mathematical computation.
In 1993 there was no suitable textbook for this course and I am not convinced that there is one now. I have reviewed three Maple texts for journals and publishers; the two that were written in English both contained quite serious errors and have a different focus from my course. Consequently, I have produced typeset lecture notes. These consist of a volume of 114 pages that I arrange to have printed each year and sold through the College bookshop at cost to the students. I produced these notes entirely using Maple, and I make the files freely available to students on both the teaching network and the web (http://centaur.maths.qmw.ac.uk/Comp_Maths_II/). I also make all coursework and past test and examination questions and solutions available to students as Maple worksheets on the teaching network and the web; all other course information is also available online in appropriate formats.
As an experiment in 1999 I implemented the student questionnaire for my course as a web-based form. There are several advantages. It takes almost no staff time to process the results because the system provides a statistical summary and gathers together the comments instantly. Students can complete the questionnaire at their leisure, even at home if they have Internet access. It could be completely paperless. It is undoubtedly the way such things will be done in the future and using the web is an important transferable skill for students. This experiment was very successful technically, but to make it completely successful the students need an incentive to overcome their inertia!
CATHODE Esprit Working Group Member
“The International Journal of Computer Algebra in Mathematics Education” Editorial Board Member
Zentralblatt für Mathematik Reviewer
Open University MSc Course Maple Consultant
Occasional refereeing, e.g. for the Journal of Symbolic Computation and Maple Technical Journal
Most of my recent work is available on my web site http://centaur.maths.qmw.ac.uk/.
A few years ago I was invited to join the REDUCE development group, which consists of about twenty academics around the world. The REDUCE development collaboration is web-based and I set up and maintain the four packages currently served from QMW (http://reduce.maths.qmw.ac.uk/packages/), of which I co-wrote three. I have also made a large number of small contributions to REDUCE that are incorporated into the core system maintained at the Rand Corporation in the US. Most of my contributions except ODESolve, which is still experimental, are distributed with REDUCE 3.7.
I was a member of the CATHODE Working Group nominally since its inception (except that I was in Brazil for most of the first year). I contributed the REDUCE implementation of a set of primitives for manipulation of linear ordinary differential operators (LODOs) to the CATHODE library and described the implementation at one of the CATHODE Workshops. I primarily maintain the UK CATHODE web site (http://cathode.maths.qmw.ac.uk/) and I designed and implemented web-based demonstrations of the UK CATHODE software for solving/investigating differential equations. The QMW software is all written in REDUCE and the Kent Differential Gröbner Basis code is written in Maple.
ODESolve has been one of my major ongoing research projects since about 1995, and my aim is to implement a comprehensive user-friendly ODE solver for REDUCE. It is a development from the original REDUCE ODE solver written primarily by Malcolm MacCallum in 1989/90, although there is not much of the original code left now. I gave a talk and demonstration at the 1999 CATHODE Workshop.
Since January 1998 I have been collaborating with Dr Basia Bogacka, a statistician colleague. We have been working on problems in the optimum design of chemical experiments. My contribution is primarily the computation, for which we are using Maple. This project involves an interesting combination of algebraic and numeric computation and graphics. I needed a numerical optimisation routine, and since none was available I wrote one which I have been enhancing as the project has developed. It is a Maple implementation (called slink) of a well-known algorithm published some time ago. Interest in this topic was expressed in the Maple Users Group a while ago, so I have made my code publicly available via my website. It was mentioned obliquely in a recent (1999) Maple newsletter and I plan soon to write up a description of my implementation for publication. Basia and I have produced a preprint of the first part of our work so far, which we plan to publish as two papers. The work has been well received at conferences where Basia has presented it, and she described it in her 1999 School Anniversary talk. We have also discussed a related project in collaboration with an experimental group in Poland concerning experiments to measure the development of toxins caused by fungi on wheat.
One of my “spare time” activities over recent years has been enhancements of the free and widely used Emacs editor. These consist of some minor utilities and a couple of major packages, all of which I make freely available via my web site. One of the major packages provides an Integrated Development Environment for REDUCE, which I use for all my REDUCE development work. An earlier version of this is distributed with REDUCE 3.7. The other major package allows “UNIX Programmers Manual” documents to be browsed without access to any other UNIX facilities, such as on a PC running Windows (which is my preferred platform). I have assigned copyright in this package and my general Emacs enhancements to the Free Software Foundation with a view to them being included in the distribution of Emacs 21.
Senior Tutor, 1993–2000
Staff-Student Liaison Committee, 1993–2000
Undergraduate student database co-manager, 1993–1997
Undergraduate web co-manager, 1993–1997
Administrator shortlist selector, March 2000
Faculty Board, 1993–2000
Academic Computer Users Committee Chairman, 1993–1994
Academic Access Student Record Working Party, 1998–2000
Examination Offences Panel, 1998
Tutors Handbook Working Party, 1998–1999
Academic Information Services Committee, 1999–2000
Enrolment Working Party, 1999–2000
Computing Services Liaison Officer Interview Panel, November 1999
As Departmental Senior Tutor I have overall responsibility for all aspects of student advising and student welfare. I manage the induction programme for new students, which primarily involves organising several briefing meetings for different groups of students and ensuring that all our students get the right documentation at the right time. I allocate academic advisers to new students and re-allocate advisers when staff go on leave. I keep records of all changes of study programme and all extenuating circumstances reported by students. I advise both students and advisers on technicalities of College regulations and procedures, and on seeking specialist help from other parts of the College such as the Registry and Student Counselling and Welfare Service, with both of which I liaise quite closely. I act as adviser for students whose normal adviser is not available, and I deal with random queries (which are often referred to me by the secretaries). This includes writing references for students whose adviser has left or is on leave.
I wrote a set of notes to provide guidance to colleagues on the aspects for which I am responsible. I now update these annually and they are published as a chapter (currently 27 pages) in our staff handbook. I also publish a version of this document with occasional updates on a departmental Intranet (which I set up for this purpose).
I maintain a database of all current mathematics students on my office computer using Microsoft Access. I use this primarily to keep track of changes of study programme and adviser, and to store comments on any special or extenuating circumstances affecting a student. The comment fields are confidential. I normally make them available only to each student’s personal academic adviser and to the Board of Examiners. It is now one of my roles as Senior Tutor formally to report special circumstances to the Board of Examiners. The factual information in my database should agree with that in the Registry database and I try to compare the two once a semester and correct any mismatches. To do this I have to extract the information I want from course registration information, which involves some non-trivial data processing. I have liaised with Registry and MISU over the years to try to get errors in their data format corrected.
Because information about study programmes and advisers flows from me to the Registry, my database is generally more accurate than theirs. For that reason, and also for convenience of access, I export a subset of my data in various formats, e.g. as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets or Word tables to colleagues such as the student secretary. I also make the information available via my departmental Intranet as an HTML table and in CSV format.
For several years I was responsible together with Franco Vivaldi for developing and maintaining a departmental student database. The original purpose of this was to record marks for coursework; we then extended it to accommodate tests and later exams. When I became involved in this project in 1993, Franco had set up a system of files to record marks for first year courses. I extended this to all years and I managed general user access. I think it was I who introduced a system for constructing empty mark files from data from the Registry, consisting of a list of the students registered for each course. I designed and wrote a command to allow all staff to access the data in various convenient ways, primarily on a per-student basis. The final version of this command was called Show_student_data. It first consulted a master list of mathematics students (constructed from my Senior Tutor database) and then gathered data from the various mark files in the system. I introduced a mechanism to give the courses intelligible names, which involved setting up and maintaining a set of tables that were used to access the mark files indirectly. I wrote a comprehensive user guide, which I distributed on paper and on the web.
As Senior Tutor, I developed a system that allows me to scan the whole marks database looking for students who are not keeping up to date with their coursework requirements. This system produces a provisional list of students together with the courses in which their performance appears to be inadequate. I run Show_student_data on each of these students to determine whether there really is a problem and if so how severe. I have developed a semi-automatic system using mail merge from my database to generate letters to be sent to students who are causing concern. There are four different letters, depending on whether the student is first year or not, and on whether coursework is almost totally absent or just insufficient. The year is handled automatically but the severity relies on my assessment. This scheme is only as good as the data in the marks database, but apart from that I think it works well. It is one of the main mechanisms that I use to try to prevent students from failing a year, by allowing me to detect early signs of problems.
I wrote the first part of the UG student handbook that we introduced in 1993–4 (based on a previous document by Don Collins). I updated this document annually until 1997 when the job of departmental information officer was introduced. I designed and provided most of the data for a first version of a web page for Mathematics undergraduates. This page gave access to my part of the UG handbook and to a range of other student data that I maintained, such as adviser allocations.
For a long time, I have been pressing for academic staff to be given better electronic access to student information in the Registry database, an issue about which I was particularly active as Chairman of the Academic Computer Users Committee. After a very long struggle, the School finally gained online access, and I have been one of the major users of this Academic Access system. However, the system was not as user-friendly as one might have wished, and it appears that very few academic staff actually used it. In consequence, I was invited by the Director of MISU to join a working party to design a more user-friendly system, and recently I was invited to be the first test user of a prototype for the new system. I have spent some time working with MISU on developing this system, now called Distributed Access, which I believe represents a major step forward.
I have developed a talk on “Mathematics and Computing” for prospective students, which I have given occasionally on departmental open day.
I have taken advantage of some of the facilities for professional development offered by the College, focussing on Information Technology, which is an area that particularly interests me. A few years ago I attended a course on Microsoft Access and shortly after that I began to use Access to maintain my student database. In 1998 I attended a course on accessing bibliographic databases run by the College Library, and in January 1999 I attended a course on the use of the College web templates. I believe that I was the first person tested at the College to obtain a “European Computer Driving Licence”, which is an interesting new initiative by the European Union.
I have worked hard to maintain close links with the College’s Student Counselling and Welfare Services and I have attended most (if not all) of the meetings that they have organised for Departmental Senior Tutors or Advisers in general. During 1998–99 I was a member of a working party to develop a College-wide handbook for Tutors and Advisers, part of which I wrote.
In our 1998 Teaching Quality Assessment, the area of Student Guidance and Welfare obtained full marks and the Chief Assessor’s summing up implied that the School was doing a particularly good job in this area. I believe that my efforts since 1993 made a significant contribution to this success.