Simple City  

On Saturday, I gave my first ever webinar on the topic of “Some families of polyhedra”. And if you don’t know your tetrahemihexahedron from your tridiminished rhombicosidodecahedron, the good news is that the whole thing is available to see and hear here. It’s just over an hour long, but of course one advantage the recorded version has over the live one is the ability to fast forward, pause, and rewind.

It was hosted over at Mathfuture, by Maria Droujkova. My aim in the talk was to give a very brisk overview of how several different families of wonderful, complex shapes all arise from juggling a very small number of simple criteria. I’m separately uploading my powerpoint presentation here. It’s quite rough and ready, without any detailed explanations, or even any pictures – I used Stella for those. But it does sketch the central story (which I also covered in this blogpost). I may spruce it up one day, if I give the same talk again.

I found the whole thing a thoroughly enjoyable experience, and the Elluminate technology worked extremely smoothly. The format allowed me to talk while sharing my whole desktop with the audience, with the optimal result of people being able to hear my voice and watch everything I was doing, without having to endure looking at my face. And we could all do it from the comfort of our living rooms! This is sort of thing the internet was intended for, isn’t it?

I’m jabbering on here, in illustrious company, in a Maths Special edition of the Guardian’s Science Weekly podcast.

I was recently also scheduled to host an online event over at Mathfuture, but regretfully postponed it. It will be rescheduled, and I’ll provide advanced warning of the new date, in case anyone wishes to come and meet me in the aether…