Since ‘a body continues in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line except in so far as it is compelled by forces to change that state’, the very first question that should be asked about walking is why any energy at all need be expended in maintaining fixed speed on level ground. With a wheeled vehicle remarkably little force is exerted for this once it is got going, and virtually all the energy is used to overcome resistive drag. But the body is not dragged, and there is little resistance presented by relaxed, healthy limbs.

Mathematica is a computer software system for symbolic manipulation and numerical computation; it has excellent graphics, a high-level, mathematically-oriented programming language and, very importantly, it takes seriously the need for work to be interactive, properly presented and communicated. This article is in fact prepared as a Mathematica “notebook”. An extensive library of supporting software “packages” has been developed, and several books about using it are now available.

It is well known that the simpler regular solids can be assembled into compounds which have, as a whole, the symmetry of a more complicated solid : two tetrahedra with a symmetry of a cube, five cubes with that of a dodecahedron, and so forth ([1] p. 134, [2] p. 134).

Miss L. D. Adams had a personality of such warmth and generosity that her loss will be deeply felt by very many people associated with education. Some will have known her personally through her visits to schools as H.M.I., or her lively contributions at conferences and refresher courses. We in this Association mourn her as one of our most distinguished members. She had an unbroken record of fifty-one years of membership and during that period had served on the Teaching Committee for some twenty years, exerting a strong formative influence which helped the Committee to broaden its enquiries until it can now claim to have produced reports on the whole range of school mathematics. The quality of thought that she brought to the Association’s discussions was recognized in 1959 when she was elected President, only the second woman to hold that office in the long years from 1871. To Miss Adams this tribute from the Association brought surprise and much pleasure, for in her natural modesty she had not thought of herself as possessing any gifts to merit her election.

Every year, thousands of students around the world encounter Ferrers graphs. Most of these students probably assume that Ferrers was a mathematician and that his name is among the hundreds at a well-known website specialising in mathematical biography. The first assumption is correct.

Norman Macleod Ferrers was born 11 August 1829 in Gloucester. In 1851, he received a BA degree from Cambridge University, with honours. He was Senior Wrangler and winner of first prize in the Smith mathematics competition. He studied law and was called to the bar in 1855, but returned to Caius College in 1856 as a mathematical lecturer, and was ordained apriest in 1861.