Recently a poem, written by Blanche Descartes in the 1930s, was republished in the Gazette, with the additional attribution ‘communicated via Cedric A. B. Smith’. Cedric had reported ‘it was written after Blanche heard that Hector Pétard was about to be married. She composed the verse as a wedding present. Hector is still active mathematically, though I suspect that he may be in his mid nineties’. We felt that readers might be interested to know something about the mysterious Blanche Descartes, and the origins of the poem. It makes quite a story. At the risk of boring you, we will start at the beginning.

Over the past few years more and more schools have been able to gain access to computers. Many have their own terminals, and can work on-line, others send their material to a centre for batch processing. This article looks at some examples of the way such computing facilities can be used in the teaching of statistics. Clearly much more work can be done with interactive programs carried out on-line, but a great deal can be done with off-line facilities. Two difficulties with statistics are that experiments can take a long time and that the resulting computations can become tedious. In both cases the main statistical ideas can get lost in the sheer drudgery involved. One undeniable advantage of a computer is that it does things quickly. It is putting these two facts together that can make computers a useful tool in the teaching of statistics.

Charles Godfrey was born in October, 1873. At an early age he went to King Edward’s School, Birmingham, where he was head of the school, a position which depended entirely on a boy’s ability in classics, and he spent at least five years in the top mathematical division under Rawdon Levett. The top mathematical division in those days consisted of a dozen boys, and generally contained three future major scholars of Trinity. Godfrey went up to Trinity as a major scholar in 1892, and was fourth wrangler in a brilliant year (1895), with Bromwich, Grace and E. T. Whittaker above him; in the following year he was placed in the first division of the first class of Part II. of the Mathematical Tripos; later on he won the Isaac Newton Studentship.

In the last paragraph of an article entitled “Octahedra Inscribed in a Cube” by T. Bakos, Math. Gazette, Vol. XLIII pp. 17-20, (1959), the following statement is made: “About a cube (±b, ±b, ±b) one can circumscribe 3 regular octahedra (the edges of the octahedra through the vertices of the cube); their vertices are:

The aim of this note is simply to encourage dialogue between mathematics and physics teachers. In most school physics and chemistry courses, any mention of quantum theory has been limited to a brief qualitative discussion, or has been restricted to the simple Bohr theory. The new Nuffield Advanced Physics material [1] goes much further than this, with the opportunity to apply some quite simple mathematics, supported by a computer analysis. We shall here give a gross simplification of the end of a long story in the physics course.

Ann Hirst and Keith Lloyd have derived many interesting properties of the Cassini ovals rr′ = a2, r and r′ being the distances of a variable point P from two fixed points A and B, which we shall find it convenient to take a unit distance apart. r, r′ are often referred to as bipolar coordinates and by relating them in different ways, a variety of interesting families of curves can be defined; such families can be associated with other families which are their orthogonal trajectories. The purpose of this article is to draw attention to a number of such cases.

The object of this note is to give a simple geometrical proof of the following well-known

That Spring morning, the bent old man sat down at his large oak desk with his pen momentarily poised over the familiar blue foolscap sheet. He furtively glanced around the drawing room with its old china and flowers and books in abundance and wrote in one easy movement: The principles of book-keeping by double entry. He looked up once more but this time allowed a minute to gaze out through the window to the Cam gently meandering through the meadows towards the Cambridge colleges.

“Find the modulus and the argument of each root of the equation:

(University of London A level, part question.)

We were investigating iterative methods of solving the equation, using a micro-package (in BASIC) which performs complex arithmetic and displays the results in an Argand diagram. The facility for “doodling” which this provides led to some interesting conjectures and results, of which this note is an account.