My favourite web sites

This is just a list of some of the things from my favourites menus.

Mandelbrot pictures (gallery) - beautifully rendered mathematical images

The KnotPlot Site - knots are a special field of study in mathematics, and there are connections between knot theory and some of my puzzles that I am trying to get published.

Virtual Reality Polyhedra - artistic approach to polyhedra

History of Mathematics - Excellent on line encyclopedia maintained at the university of St Andrews.

Famous Curves Index (from the same site). Java applet to explore various mathematical curves.

3D art One of the sites listed in the Povray home page gallery; this one has some images by Escher recreated and raytraced in Povray, also a couple in VRML so that you can enter the world and explore it.

Blazons - a rather innovative program idea - you can type in a description of a heraldic coat of arms, and it makes it from your description. The description can be anything; it doesn't need to correspond to any actual coat of arms.

The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search To find the next perfect number (number which is the sum of all the numbers that divide into it, including 1, but not the number itself). 6, and 28 are perfect, but there are only 37 perfect numbers known so far, and nobody knows for sure that the sequence goes on for ever. This site has a program you can download to join the search if you want to. It finds Mersenne primes, each of which can be used to make a new perfect number. For more about the relationship between Mersenne primes and perfect numbers, see this site: Perfect numbers and a few theorems

Astronomy Now | Breaking News - latest news of what's happening in astronomy

Contact light - a personal retrospective of Apollo - lots of the photographs from the moon. I have one of them on my desktop right now.Seti At Home Where you can join in the search for ET by downloading a screen saver.

Seti At Home Where you can join in the search for ET by downloading a screen saver.

I don't think UFOs are ETs because astronomers look at the sky more intently than anyone else and never see them. But many astronomers think life may be very common round other stars. If so, some of them may have developed civilisations, and some of them may have followed sufficiently similar lines to us so that they might have developed radio etc. If so, we've got a chance of finding them by listening with our radio telescopes.

As to why they aren't here yet, I think perhaps journeying between stars is rather expensive, time consuming, and maybe a bit risky too. Older civilisations are probably less adventurous, especially if the individuals have long lives too, and they probably only travel if there is something or someone very special to visit at the end of the journey. Imagine the excitement when a young previously unknown civilisation is contacted for the first time, with new ideas etc. I expect it probably doesn't happen that often.

The Wild Ones A place to find out about endangered animals, set out for children. You can click to hear what some of the animals sound like.

Bird Song Links Where to go to find out what a particular bird sounds like.

Laurens Lapre's LParser A program for making fractal trees, free download.

WZebra A program that plays Othello, and beats the best human champions at the game every time - free download.

While Go is much harder for computers, and the best computer programs in the world are only as good as a Japanese school child with a few years experience.

The Vincent van Gogh Information Gallery All of Van Goghs pictures, and lots more including his thoughts about art.

International Date Line Why the little country of Kiribati moved the international date line, and so was the first to see the new Millenium by two time zones.

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