Have had my eye on doing this for a while- think top trumps, but SOOOO much better.

Had in mind stats of: Age, Courses run, Maths power (out of 10), Blackboard rubbing time (s/full blackboard) and the mysterious "X-factor"(out of 100).

So Colin Rourke could be

Age: 60+
Courses run: 1
Maths power: 8
Blackboard rubbing time: 9.5 est
X-factor: 97

Do we want more stats- or different ones?
Designs?!
Send in your suggestions now!!!!!!!!!!

You could get papers published in there, and some kind of intelligibility ranking.

You are forgetting Erdos Numbers, Category Numbers, H-indexes etc. I think H-indexes can be looked up on some online database, but the rest are more tricky to discover.

http://www.ams.org/mathscinet/freeTools.html works for most peoples' erdos numbers...

Jamie

Siksek has Erdos number 3... :D

number of mathematical descendants?

That's a good one too. You can use http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/ to figure it out. We can also add "best mathematical ancestor" or something, going up the genealogy to see to whom it leads.

Oh yes! Should we ask Sparrow if we can make them?

?

No.

What's the difference ?

:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D

POST OF THE YEAR HERE PEOPLE

O.k. Just wet myself laughing.

You have done well sir.

You should start using that as your avatar. :D

Absolute genius.

All that's left is to show this too him, it's freakin' brilliant.

do you reckon he'd let us put that on the "post of the week" board?

I don't think there's any doubt that it's the post of the week. It's not offensive at all so he shouldn't have a problem with it.

Make sure you get all four of the posts, and in colour.

You just say that because you want to be famous too

He is, he presented "location location location" for a brief period.

Top trumps please team.

I think we should get the whole staff of the maths department and convert them to pirates (by force or otherwise)
That'll do for the pictures

We could do it C.U. style:

Is swashbuckling 'incompatible' with science?
Free open and impartial discussion of swashbuckling issues by a top local pirate- answering the tough questions- free lunch provided- all welcome!

We'll have 'em in no time

You just say that because you want to be famous too

Actually I think it would be much more funny.

Anyway, back to the topic. Tom, I actually think these would be really fun to do, we should ask staff if they be okay with it.

And if they're not, do it anyway, just a little quieter like.

Absolutely old boy, but if we're going to get anything done- forum's the best place, then it's not one person's job...

Your lecturer top trumps please...

We need to settle once and for all what stats we're going to use. I think erdos numbers and similar are going to be a little too difficult to research.

I propose;
age(<100)
courses run(1-10?)
maths power (1-11)
board rubbing (<120)
x-factor (1-100)
office proximity to MS:02 (1-10)
Miles to home country (0-10000000?)

Complaints, suggestions?

I disagree, Erdos numbers look to be fairly easy, just a matter of poking around on the internet for their published works etc. However 7 stats sounds about right (cards tend to have 5-10 stats). Not sure about the courses run thing, I looked through Mathsuff and the maximum looked to be 4 courses, that's a bit too tightly packed I think. The other stats seem pretty good though. We're going to need some fairly decent maps/blueprints for the proximity stat, do we want to go for shortest walking distance or just the straight line distance?

We are very frequently in the building! Why do we need blueprints???

We are very frequently in the building!

Number of mathematical decendants turns out to be easy if you follow a link higher up this thread. Very interesting to look up, by the way. H-index is proving to be a little tricky, but never mind.

Do you want to walk through the building with a click wheel... Actually that doesn't sound too bad, alternatively we could just use large pieces of string running through the department, I'm sure some of the staff would be glad to know the quickest route downstairs :P

Maybe we can approximate it with some integer-valued distance thing. It probably wouldn't be a well-defined metric, but it would suffice for top trumps purposes.

Could we not just measure it on the map, and work out the 'cost' of going up/down stairs? Having a value in meters would be much fun.

We could give t a value from 1-20, its not important, at least with this category we won't have 1 or 2 super lecturers that cant be beaten in our top trumps game. I think stevens idea would work best (will be easiest for person working it out).

Are we now happy with my list plus erdos number then?

Do we have enough data for blackboard rubbing times, and what about number of mathematical descendants?

Look up that link, mathematical decendants are easy. As for blackboard rubbing times, if anything I think we have too much for some lecturers, and we would have had to start out with a fairly small subset anyway until the project really warms up.

I think a nah to mathematical decendants i think what we have now is good.

Yeah, it's hard to find some of the lecturers on the database, it's not quite comprehensive it appears

So we have:
age
courses run
maths power (1-11)
board rubbing (seconds)
x-factor (1-100)
office proximity to MS:02 (rough est in m)
Miles to home country
Erdos number

Feel free to get posting your suggestions. We may well debate over the x-factor but just put your best guess.

Age is an annoying one, as it will make the cards progressively less accurate.

Well, not if you fix a reference date
I suggest "Age on Cosmin's 100th birthday"

Otherwise, I find "miles to home country" to not be a very exciting statistic, how about some presence statistic, of how often you see them around in the maths department ?

That could depend heavily on where you have your supervisions etc., sounds a bit dodgy to me. Miles to home country IS a dull statistic but it will give a good statistic to some lecturers who otherwise have worse overall stats.

Well time to find a non dull statistic that has that property too.
And I don't think that time spent in the department in average is a bad statistic, just could be hard to find...
Any ideas ?

University number (if their's is prime they win, otherwise draw)

I agree that age should be scrapped.

Is there anything majorly wrong with the categories we have now because it'd be nice to start doing some lecturer statistics like Tom suggested. I sorta intended inventing the fields to be a quick thing.

Well, let's get cracking with the old research then. I imagine that Sparrow is cool with all this, but it would be wise to check nonetheless. Then it's just a matter of doing a little research.

to kick off, let's condsider Erdos numbers:

Colin Sparrow: 3
Colin Rourke: 4
Mario Micallef: 4
Anthony Manning: 3
Inna Korchagina :3 (I think her name is different now though).
Bas Lemmens: 4
David Preiss: 1
K. David Elworthy: 3

I'll do some more later.

Obv hair should feature as a factor in some way. The balder the better :)

We can include that with the mysterious X-factor, see, we think of everything

Surely the easy way around having the cards become outdated is not to list age, but year of birth?

Surely the easy way around having the cards become outdated is not to list age, but year of birth?

Date of PhD would be better than either.

...and also very easy to find, on the Mathematics Genealogy site.