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| You are now on the second page of our tour of central London, 27 July 2000. Join us as we head towards the Tate Modern gallery of ART, looking around us on our way. | |
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We are still on the north bank of the Thames. Keep open your street map. First we visit the very grand Somerset House which has recently been released from government use and taken over by the Courtauld Institute of ART. What strikes me about the Courtauld Institute is its lavish accommodation, as compared with its immediate neighbour in the University of London, King's College, London, and in particular its Department of Mathematics. | |
art/mathsIn June 2000 I was a speaker at a King's College event for school students thinking of applying for a maths degree course. I was asked to talk about how the Enigma cipher was cracked, and had several difficulties. One was having to follow a beautiful talk by Sir Andrew Wiles on Fermat's famous last theorem. |  Sir Andrew Wiles (centre) posing in the common room of the Mathematics Department at King's College, London. Note the decor. |
| Another difficulty was that of explaining Turing's logic which was at the heart of the Enigma-breaking process. It is also very beautiful, but not at all easy to understand without serious study. Yet a further difficulty lay in having to intimate reasonably politely that the account of Turing's logic in Simon Singh's popular book The Code Book is wrong. I told them: in maths, you don't have to believe what one person or another person tells you: maths means thinking for yourself. I was glad to know that a lot of the students had seen The Life of Brian (and so saw the logical paradox in what I was telling them to do.) That's my maths culture: aspiring to absolute objectivity, yet more individualistic than science; with a strong aesthetic component, yet quite different from art. | |
 Picture in February 2000, from the Ministry of Defence. | South of the riverAt last we cross Waterloo Bridge, passing the elegant and powerful London Eye.We follow the ART route through the OXO tower. Update your Street Map. |
| We approach Blackfriars Bridge where I saw the fireworks for Y2K. |  |
A fault with reality...and now we see the new ultra-cool Millennium Bridge, which was supposed to connect the City of London to the Tate Modern.Unfortunately the elegant design showed up a deficiency in the world of mathematical and physical reality. | |
| This was the Millennium Bridge as I saw it on its opening day, 10 June 2000. It turned out to resonate dangerously when people walked on it, so it was immediately closed again. |
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 | These are pictures of the Millennium Bridge I took on 29 June 2000, when it was closed for two years of structural modification. In each picture you can see our goal. We enter... (it is free)... |
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