Robert Low

Keep pushing! Things must be due to get better again: in my state school (the local comprehensive) Latin was available as a matter of course, and Ancient Greek by special request (which, to be fair, was not common). But things changed a lot in the half century since then :-(

It's all part of the Brexti bonus.

The (unfortunate) fact that it also means 'date-palm' has, on occasion, caused me considerable confusion. (Always clear from the context, indeed :-()

So much this (the "but" part).

...the sort of nonsense up with which one should refuse to put.

Finally, a real use for those addition formulae :-)

Ok the other hand, maybe if he thinks about it hard enough he'll have the genius idea of reclassifying some fraction of universities as polytechnics. (As it happens I think that dissolving the binary divide was really harmful to HE.)

This is nice: a real grind (probably need a computer to do the arithmetic), or a flash of insight that makes it doable without even pencil and paper.

Somebody took seriously the injunction to "let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doth" (and maybe also took it a tiny bit out of context).

Pretty sure i remember when "everybody knew"* that prehistoric society was matriarchal and they all worshipped the Great Mother Goddess.

*They didn't really know that.

Born then, but came of age in 1908 with Minkowski's Space and Time lecture (even though Einstein was initially dismissive).

Uncomfortably similar to natural intelligence, then...

Woohoo, a Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band reference!

Gone, but not (entirely) forgotten.

Though for some reason we still get annoyed when they don't do something they promised they would do, or do do something they promised they wouldn't do. (Mumble lib dem mumble student fees mumble.)

I've seen the (inappropriate) use of mathematics in the social sciences called 'physics envy'. Economics probably has it worst.

Whether it's a bug or a feature, I think one difference between Bluesky and ex-twitter is that it's easier for stuff to penetrate your bubble on ex-twitter. (Mostly, I suspect, a function of the sheer number of people on ex-twitter.)

You no laica?

The only thing that puzzles experts about this kind of thing is why so many people are so quick to think it's time travel/aliens/lost ancient civilizations.

That should work excellently, since Lithuanian is basically Latin anyway. 😈

There are more Latin readers for beginners than you can shake a stick at on the archive: lots of free reading material, as long as you don't mind reading on screen. (I'm a big believer in high volume low effort reading, especially at the early stages.)

Antigone.

I used to do it by proving the product rule, and the rather easy result that the derivative of x -> x is 1. (OK, so there might have been a bit of induction involved, but you probably needed that for the binomial theorem anyway.)

If it isn't Katharine Hepburn, it isn't Eleanor of Aquitaine. Sorry, I don't make the rules.

Your last paragraph may just be a more workable alternative to the current student loan system: free tuition, but a lifetime tithe to the institution. (More seriously, I hope nobody from the government is reading this, it might give them ideas.)

Yes, I knew he worked in number theory - if anything that makes the specific choice of equation on the cover stranger. Of course, maybe the cover designer just wanted something everybody would recognize. (Are we yet at the point of blaming any weird design choice on AI?)

Fits in with the a^n+b^n=c... on the cover. But I didn't think Hardy worked on Fermat's Last Theorem, so the relevance escapes me.

I don't know who's going to be more disappointed: them or the rest of us.

Probably wouldn't have been a good day to be an old tramp sleeping rough in the cemetery, though ...

Alternative approach: scan student IDs at the door, and make it all automatic.

NB: This can led to a certain amount of congestion at the door as one person scans an entire deck of IDs for all their friends....

And the rest of the world reads this and mutters 'No shit, Sherlock'.