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Myra Hindley: Rape-Murderers

Serial murderer Myra Hindley is often portrayed as an “evil icon”. Her crimes of sadistic murder against children continue to shock. There are few artistic sights so terrifying as the giant portrait of Hindley composed of the handprints of children.

Artificial Intelligence and Humour

Could AI replace stand-up comedians and scriptwriters? This may not be an impossible dream if you accept that nothing we do is forever beyond the scope of computer modelling.

The Maths of Life and Death

This talk relates true stories of life-changing events in which the use (or abuse) of mathematics has played a critical role. You will meet innocent victims of miscarriages of justice and the unwitting victims of mathematical bugs.

Where do Mathematical Symbols Come From?

Where do we get our mathematical symbols from? Why is the set of integers called ℤ ? When was the equals sign first used? How about zero? Good notation tends to catch on quickly, whereas bad notation can obscure beautiful theory.

Dickens's Public Readings: A Tale of Two Desks

This illustrated lecture marks 150 years since Dickens’s death by reflecting on the nature of his creative genius and his legacy.

Networks: The Internet and Beyond

Networks were seen as a rather arcane and dull area in computer science. Then along came the internet, and everything changed for ever.

Dickens: The Last Decade

In the last ten years of his life Charles Dickens related to his adoring public in a number of different ways; as novelist, as journalist, as public speaker, and in public readings of his own work.

Nurse Ratched: Evil Nurses

Nurse Ratched is the evil nurse in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962). She is the Evil Woman as autocratic, the absolute power in a psychiatric ward, which is the ultimate “total institution”.

Computers: A History

Even the most humdrum of electrical devices nowadays contains at least one computer; yet surprisingly few people are aware of their history, their form or function. In this talk we will see that not only is the history of computers rich and diverse, their architecture likewise.

Mathematical Structure in Fiction

Mathematical concepts have often been used to create new structural forms in fiction, as in the works of Raymond Queneau and Jorge Luis Borges.

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