I was until 2006 a professor of mathematics at the University of Wales Bangor (aka University of Bangor). The University closed down the Mathematics degree and I was ‘retired’! Since then I have been on various interesting visiting positions, whilst being Emeritus, retaining an office in the Computer Science section of the university and continuing to work at least as hard as before (I claim). I am also an emeritus member of WIMCS, the Wales Institute of Mathematical and Computational Sciences.
Not offering a maths degree is one thing, but it seems that they don't even have a maths department! Who teaches basic maths courses to the CS (and chemistry, biology, electronics, …) majors? —Toby
In the UK, there are several universities that do not have mathematics departments and in which engineers, computer scientists, physicists and chemists do not get any theoretically based mathematics to speak of. Biologists have traditionally received no mathematics training after the age of 16. (Sometimes it shows and is the bane of the statisticians detailed to teach biology students statistics, and don’t mention psychology students! Note also that quite a few of the so called ‘financial experts’ in the UK have little or no maths. Some do, and I am not saying that they were any better in the causes of the recent crisis!)
In Bangor, it is even worse. Not only is there no mathematics department. There are no mathematicians per se, employed as full time members of staff. There are mathematically competent people in some departments who do teach their undergraduates mathematics. I, of course, do not think that is as good.
-Tim
I am writing a series of notes on the theory and application of crossed gadgetry in algebra and topology, and some parts of these notes (approximately first 10 chapters) have been made available on the web at various times. I am currently trying to write new sections on the links between homotopy quantum field theory and non-Abelian cohomology.
I am also very interested in directed homotopy theory and the application of ideas form the general area of the infinity category/homotopy toolkit in topological data analysis, artificial intelligence, and computer science. Some material can be found on those personal pages.
See also my private Lab area, where I have put a link to a recent version of the first 10 chapters of the Menagerie.
Other goodies there include parts of a draft monograph on profinite homotopical algebra?, and a (slightly reformatted) version of a research proposal from 2002, that did not get funded, but may be useful as it does have some ideas in it (or related to it) that are worth pursuing especially since the recent progress on the cobordism and TQFT problems. There are also some lecture notes form lecture in Hagen and La Laguna, and a survey article that grew out of talks in 1991 in Italy.
I have also put the start of a brief discussion of the relationships between the Cech and Vietoris methods and the newly developed methods of Topological Data Analysis.
Please go to private Lab area for downloads and more details.
The Menagerie: a set of notes on crossed modules, higher dimensional analogues, simplicial techniques, homotopy coherence, and non-Abelian cohomology of various sorts. This version consists of 10 chapter. It will be updated periodically.
Abstract Homotopy Theory: The Interaction of Category Theory and Homotopy theory This article is an expanded version of notes for a series of lectures given at the Corso estivo Categorie e Topologia in 1991. They appeared in more or less this form in Cubo, 5 (2003) 115-165, 2003.
-categories, -groupoids, Segal categories and quasicategories The notes were prepared for a series of talks that I gave in Hagen in late June and early July 2003, and, with some changes, in the University of La Laguna, the Canary Islands, in September, 2003.
Profinite Algebraic Homotopy. There is a link to the first seven chapters of a draft monograph. This may be going to be published, so this is an incomplete version.