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# Siobhan Roberts

Author, Science Journalist

## Sitemaps

- [XML Sitemap](https://siobhanroberts.com/sitemap.xml): Contains all public & indexable URLs for this website.

## Posts

- [In Seattle, a Convergence of 5,444 Mathematical Minds](https://siobhanroberts.com/in-seattle-a-convergence-of-5444-mathematical-minds/) - The world’s largest gathering of mathematicians convened in Seattle from Jan. 8 to Jan. 11 — 5,444 mathematicians, 3,272 talks. This year the program diverged somewhat from the its traditional kaleidoscopic panorama. An official theme, “Mathematics in the Age of A.I.,” was set by Bryna Kra, the president of the American Mathematical Society, which hosts
- [Barcoding Life](https://siobhanroberts.com/barcoding-life/) - Identifying each of the 15 million or so species on the planet may seem an impossible task. Can a genetic shortcut developed by a Canadian scientist do the job in mere decades?
- [Anatomy of an Outbreak: West Nile Virus](https://siobhanroberts.com/anatomy-of-an-outbreak-west-nile-virus/) - He puttered in his garden, and, like most of us, didn't worry much about the odd mosquito. The bites are itchy. But mosquitoes are little more than a nuisance of nature. Aren't they? A week or so after one of those bites last summer, the well-tanned 60-year-old started feeling ill. On August 12, he went
- [Broken Records](https://siobhanroberts.com/broken-records/) - Millions of precious photographs, letters, documents, and files sit in the National Archives. The pile is growing, but already, parts of it are falling apart. Is this the future of Canada’s past?
- [Into the Hot Zone](https://siobhanroberts.com/into-the-hot-zone/) - At the height of last fall's anthrax scare, scientists at Canada’s new National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg came in to work to discover that the FBI had been calling. This was quite a thrill — in the way a grocer mounts his first dollar over the cash register.
- [The Analogical Scientist](https://siobhanroberts.com/the-analogical-scientist/) - The poet Jan Zwicky once wrote, "Those who think metaphorically are enabled to think truly because the shape of their thinking echoes the shape of the world."
- [Cubic Connection](https://siobhanroberts.com/cubic-connection/) - The Princeton mathematician John Conway navigated a Friday-morning rush hour through Grand Central Station clutching a plastic shopping bag filled with the New York Times, blank pages for mathematical doodling, and a custom-made cubic puzzle.
- [Crises + Paradox = Revolution](https://siobhanroberts.com/crises-paradox-revolution/) - It’s lunchtime at the Black Hole Bistro, an in-house restaurant at Waterloo’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics…
- [Strength in Numbers](https://siobhanroberts.com/strength-in-numbers/) - For most teenagers, being condemned to spend the summer doing math problems would be a special circle of hell. But for the gifted teens at the Canada/USA Mathcamp, it's paradise -- five weeks with 110 other nerds who love math's 'elegance, its beauty, its innumerable coincidences'
- [The Cosmic Geometer](https://siobhanroberts.com/the-cosmic-geometer/) - At math conferences all over the world, of late, mathematicians have been seen lingering in darkened lecture halls, peering at multi-media screens and sporting one-eye-red/one-eye-blue, 3-D glasses.
- [Thank Einstein Almighty, They are Free at Last](https://siobhanroberts.com/thank-einstein-almighty-they-are-free-at-last/) - Two high-powered Princeton mathematicians spend their days kicking around ideas pretty much as they choose. For the past 10 years, they have been chipping away at one idea in particular: the notion of free will.

## Pages

- [Home](https://siobhanroberts.com/) - Siobhan Roberts is a Toronto-based journalist and author whose work focuses on mathematics and science. Her latest book is Genius at Play, about John Horton Conway.
- [Wind Wizard: Alan G. Davenport and the Art of Wind Engineering](https://siobhanroberts.com/wind-wizard-alan-davenport/) - In 1964, Davenport received a confidential telephone call from two engineers requesting tests on a pair of towers that promised to be the tallest in the world. His resulting wind studies on New York’s World Trade Center advanced the art and science of wind engineering with one pioneering innovation after another. Establishing the first dedicated
- [King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, The Man Who Saved Geometry](https://siobhanroberts.com/king-of-infinite-space-donald-coxeter/) - Many of the greatest names in intellectual history were geometers—Archimedes and Einstein among them—and their creativity and achievements illuminate those of Coxeter, revealing geometry to be a living, ever-evolving endeavor, an intellectual adventure that has always been a building block of civilization. Coxeter's special contributions—his famed Coxeter groups and Coxeter diagrams—have been called “tools as
- [The Floer Jungle: Charting the Development of a Theory](https://siobhanroberts.com/the-floer-jungle/) - The mathematical narrative is aimed at readers with a strong foundation—graduate students in mathematics, physics, and engineering; researchers across disciplines; and, more broadly, those with a serious scientific curiosity. “The Floer Jungle is a first-hand account of the birth of a new mathematical field, and at the same time a touching memorial to its creator—both
- [Books](https://siobhanroberts.com/books/)
- [About](https://siobhanroberts.com/about/)
- [Contact](https://siobhanroberts.com/contact/) - Send an email directly to Siobhan.
- [Conway's Game of Life Exploratorium](https://siobhanroberts.com/conways-game-of-life-exploratorium/) - Open in new window Your browser doesn't support iFrames. Please try with a different browser. Click inside the LifeViewer canvas above. To start the simulation, press the Play button or hit “Enter”. Pan and zoom to explore. To jump to labeled points of interest, click the “” buttons at the left and right
- [Genius at Play - Errata](https://siobhanroberts.com/genius-at-play/errata/) - In keeping with Conway’s “Let It All Hang Out” policy, especially with respect to errors… page 30 illustrates a figure-8 knot page 86 Leonhard Fuller is of course Euler (thanks, AutoCorrect!?!) page 117 fraction “M” is fraction “L” page 222 regarding the telegram: …On precisely the fourth of May, 1972, at 3 o’clock, Conway’s host,
- [Genius at Play](https://siobhanroberts.com/genius-at-play/) - “The book never gets bogged down in mathematical detail, yet it conveys much of the unstoppable excitement of its hero in full throttle.” —Colm Mulcahy, Huffington Post “An entertaining, often exhilarating, book.” —David Guaspari, The Weekly Standard “Genius At Play, The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway is, hands down, the best biography I have

## Categories

- [Articles](https://siobhanroberts.com/category/articles/)