Belgrave Journal

I know what you might be thinking after reading the title, probably something along the lines of "this guy picks the worst topics to write about". First it was statistics, then it was data analysis and now it's maths. It's hardly clickbait but hopefully this is more interesting than it sounds.  I recently read Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh and I thought it was amazing. Fermat's Last Theorem is a maths problem first posed by Pierre de Fermat in the 17th century. Fermat wrote that he had solved the problem but there wasn't enough space in the margin to explain it (an excuse that shouldn't be used in exams). Simon Singh's book begins in Ancient Greece, moves on to Fermat in 17th century France and then moves through the recent history of the problem including all the genius, confusion, rivalries and collaborations that occurred along the way. In this article I will focus on both individual genius and collaboration. At first glance, it might see...

     I recently told a couple of close friends of mine that I had started reading 'The Art of Statistics' by David Spiegelhalter. It would be fair to say they weren't as interested in at as I was. One response read "you're so boring it physically pains me", while the other consisted of just three words" "that looks awful". It is also fair to say that those reactions are not particularly surprising. This is not to say my friends are idiots (I'm not not saying this) but more related to the world's relationship with numbers, stats, and data in general. In my experience, it's not a subject that excites people. I want that to change so I have a few examples of numbers actually being exciting.      Everyone likes movies, right? Way more exciting than statistics. What about movies about statistics? Terrible? Nope. Ask anyone who has seen Moneyball. It is literally a film about data analysis. The whole plot is a story of how data analysis c...

Flash Crash, a story of the mysterious market crash in 2010, describes events related to the trading of S&P500 futures, the effect of high-frequency trading, one man's attempt to fight back & the legislative challenges of regulating a market in an era where technology and algorithms dominate. There is one conversation, which takes place during a Senate Banking Committee hearing, included in this book which is of critical importance to the surrounding discussion, between Senator Jack Reed and the Chair of the SEC, Mary Schapiro:     Senator Reed asks:      " The presumption of most people who own a few stocks is that the value of stocks, the liquidity of stocks is directly a function of their economic value, the same thing with debt instruments and derivatives. One of the issues we have to deal with is, with the proliferation of these algorithmic, high-frequency traders, some of these algorithms don't take into account the fundamentals of the instr...

There has been a post circulating on social media describing Elon Musk and his girlfriend, Grimes, as "the Kardashians for people who watch Rick & Morty". One quarter of the Paypal Mafia, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, serial entrepreneur Musk might have reason to feel slighted by this description. The Kardashians are best known for being reality TV stars and social media influencers, a far-cry from Musk's engineering background, so how does this comparison make sense? It is on Twitter where the boundaries are blurred. Elon Musk deliberates on the content of his tweets about as much as Donald Trump, in that it seems neither of them ever even give them a second thought before posting. It only takes a cursory scroll down Musk's personal account to see evidence of this.     Example 1: Musk tanks Tesla's stock with 7 words. "Tesla stock price is too high imo". One tweet managed to wipe $14bn off Tesla's value. This effect, in any circumstance, is...

   Another day of self-isolation. Another day of infinite possibilities but few achievements. I thought I'd use the gift of time by reading a book recommended by a friend, Life of Pi. Most people will have seen the famous movie poster: a young Indian boy stood in a boat next to a tiger, but, having never seen the film, I hadn't thought too much into the actual implications of such a situation. Despite what you will have seen in Tiger King on Netflix, an adult tiger probably isn't the best companion. Beyond this obvious fact. The story is an incredible (fictional) account of a young boy using knowledge of animals, picked up from time in his father's zoo, and ingenious improvisation to allow him to survive living on a lifeboat for months.      This being the plot, it was a surprising place to be confronted with a discussion on religion and, in particular, a multi-faith system of belief. The book begins with the protagonist, Pi, becoming engrossed in Hinduism, Chri...

You said you like techno? Name three of their songs. Despite being a poor attempt at humour, this was my view of what I considered a rather intimidating music genre in its home city. I had heard all of the stories about Berghain; you can’t smile, they don’t like English people, you have to have a ‘look’. Any information I could find on the topic was just as vague as it was useful. I landed in Berlin then, with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. Our first day was spent hitting all the tourist spots in Berlin, but it all felt like a distraction, or a way to pass the time, until the main event. As night fell, excitement rose. A  monday night , surely it’ll be quiet. After a round of naps, our alarms rang and so began our night. Several outfit changes later, we got on the U-Bahn and headed to Tresor, a club with an amazing reputation as one of the cities best, but supposedly with a reasonably forgiving door policy. Negotiating the labyrinth of dodgy dealers on the way in, the ab...