About Divide and Rule

Divide and Rule is a website conceived and built for a web design module as part of my MSc in Science Communication. The idea was not to bore visitors with incomprehensible equations (apologies if I have failed to do this), but to try and briefly tell the stories behind the mathematics. Mathematicians, I think it's fair to say, are a peculiar bunch - often eccentric, regularly misunderstood and normally avoided in social situations*, I wanted to try to show that they do also often have very interesting (and often tragic) lives. I hope you enjoy reading about my favourite characters from the history of maths, and what I consider to be the most beautiful formula. Please feel free to send me an email should you have any comments, complaints, corrections or abuse.

Site design: There are a few mathematical themes running throughout. The frame is a golden rectangle, supposedly a most aesthetically pleasing shape, and the related golden ratio crops up in various places too. The spiral on the homepage is a Fibonacci spiral, another popular design motif that uses the golden ratio. Finally, if you happened to wonder why I decided on the green and yellow on the homepage, it is a reference to the Four Colour Theorem, the first major theory in mathematics to be proved computationally.

I hope you like it...thanks for visiting. Oh, and this site is best viewed on Firefox, or anything other than Internet Explorer.

*as an ex-mathematician I'm allowed to say this

home