"Hello Wilmotters"

Let me introduce myself. Most Wilmotters have probably seen my posts in the Numerical Methods and Software forums (with the odd foray into the Off). Anyway, here's my song.

My Wilmott name is "Cuchulainn", a character who used to spend his time - when not defending the Cooley peninsula from the Munster cattle thieves - playing the game of hurling on the Cooley mountain slopes. More on this later.

I was born in Ireland in 1952. At an early age I realized that Mathematics was cool because it entailed less rote learning than other subjects such as Latin or History. In the late 1960’s (a time of great change in Ireland) the Mathematics Curriculum had become “new maths’; all of a sudden we started rotating cubes and other geometrical shapes - and as we were told by our brand-new maths teacher - were examples of a group! OK fair enough, I said. Of course, we also did Differentiation and Integration.

It did not take me long to decide that maths was for me and I immediately enrolled in the four-year Maths course in Trinity College, Dublin. Dublin in the 70’s was much different than now. At the time there were 3000 students, a fair percentage of whom came from parts foreign. In those days we did various courses on pure and applied mathematics. Most of all, the fluid dynamics, functional analysis and numerical analysis courses (and their relationship) were particularly fascinating. This spurred me to embark on research into Finite Elements and Finite Differences– which by the way – seem to be quite useful for many kinds of real-world phenomena, including QF.

In the mid 1970’s I began a kind of world tour, taking me to countries such as Italy, the Netherlands and elsewhere. Now I live on the edge of a nature reserve in a sparsely populated area of North Holland with Ilona and Brendan (and the four cats). To quote James Joyce (Finnegans Wake (no apostrophe!) it feels like “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs" and "Far calls, comimg far, Us then, End here, Finn again!"

This was the first shot.

Coming up next …

. Are Partial Differential Equations (PDE) good?

. Where is Cooley?

. C++ is easy, really

. A critique of the writings of J. Caeser(100 - 44 BC); did he tell everything?