A famous problem found in books on mathematical recreations was first proposed in an annual in 1850 by a vicar and amateur mathematician, Thomas Kirkman. Fifteen schoolgirls walk out three abreast for seven days and it was required to arrange each days walk so that any pair of girls were only once in the same row during the week.
The puzzle arose from Kirkmans work on a more general mathematical problem which he was to explore in a number of published articles over the next few years. Much of his work was ignored at the time, but it involved various combinatorial ideas that have now become of...

When he first saw Atom Egoyans film, Ararat, Dick Tahta was intrigued by the many associations it summoned up for him. The film is crammed with brief conversations and scenes that linked with memories of his childhood in a small Armenian community in Manchester in the nineteen-thirties and with the various aspects of Armenian culture that are - as in any immigrant community - carefully nourished by Armenians all over the world. Above all, the film delicately raises the issue of what later generations have made of the terrible experiences of their ancestors in the last years of the Ottoman...