My wife's night of pleasure with Jeremy Clarkson!

摘要

Ihave a confession: I had little time for public communication of mathematics, or any public engagement (PE) of science activity, when I was a young researcher. This may seem odd, because when I was a school kid I had been an avid reader of such material, including of course the brilliant Scientific American columns by Martin Gardner; however, there was little motivation for early career mathematics lecturers back in the 1980s to 'waste' any of our time doing that sort of thing! Of course, there were noble souls back then, including Chris Budd and David Acheson, who dedicated themselves without reward to the 'cause', but the gulf between those doing PE outside and inside academe was vast.