Ewart Shaw  (J. E. H. Shaw)

About Me

I recently retired from the Department of Statistics, University of Warwick, and since 2018 have been studying for a BA in Fine Art at Coventry University. Current interests include multimedia, neurodiversity, the tension between pattern and randomness, and uses of mathematics, science and computing in art. Professional interests include Bayesian inference, numerical and graphical methods, spherical and related codes, and medical statistics. I now mainly program in J, but have in the past used the usual suspects including C, C++, Fortran, Pascal and Python. Other interests include photography, and go. Previous interests include chess, guitar and squash.

Highlights

This section will eventually summarise & link to new, updated and/or popular sub-pages. Assuming, of course, that there are some.

For the moment, here's a little abstract photography.

Degrees of Separation

Erdös number = 4:
P. Erdös — R. Blecksmith — P. W. Laud — A. F. M. Smith — J. E. H. Shaw.

Kasparov number = 3:
Kasparov 0-1 Chandler 0-1 Rumens 0-1 Shaw, or Kasparov 0-1 Anand 0-1 Emms 0-1 Shaw.
Note in fairness that Garry Kasparov has a Shaw number of 2: Kasparov 1-0 Nunn 1-0 Shaw.

Shusaku number = 5:
Shusaku — Shuei — Shusai — Yasunaga — Macfadyen — Shaw.

Kibo number = 1 (attained June 1993).

Faux Bacon number = 4 (pretending that television programmes & home videos are allowed):

Kevin Bacon was in JFK (1991) with Donald Sutherland;
Donald Sutherland was in The First Great Train Robbery (1979) with Wayne Sleep;
Wayne Sleep was interviewed on Central TV (1998) with Sarah Payman-Shaw;
Sarah Payman-Shaw was in Terry Payman's New Year Video (1994) with Ewart Shaw.

Higher Degrees of Separation

My PhD genealogy includes Adrian Smith as supervisor, Dennis Lindley as grandsupervisor, George Barnard as great-grandsupervisor, Euler as great⁹-grandsupervisor, Leibniz as great¹³-grandsupervisor, and Copernicus as great¹⁹-grandsupervisor:

Nicolaus Copernicus — Georg Joachim Rheticus — Moritz Valentin Steinmetz — Christoph Meurer — Philipp Müller — Erhard Weigel — Gottfried Leibniz — Nicolas Malebranche — Jacob Bernoulli — Johann Bernoulli — Leonhard Euler — Joseph-Louis Lagrange — Siméon Denis Poisson — Michel Chasles — Hubert Anson Newton — Eliakim Hastings Moore — Oswald Veblen — Alonzo Church — George Barnard — Dennis Lindley — Adrian Smith — Ewart Shaw.

With Leibniz, relationships get complicated. As well as his doctorate from Universität Leipzig in 1666, he also had Christiaan Huygens as advisor for a dissertation at the Académie Royale des Sciences de Paris in 1676. Hence Erasmus is my step-great²²- and Thomas à Kempis my step-great²⁴-grandsupervisor:

Thomas à Kempis — Alexander Hegius — Desiderius Erasmus — Jakob Milich — Erasmus Reinhold — Valentin Naboth — Rudolph Snellius — Willebrord Snellius — Jacobus Golius — Frans van Schooten — Christiaan Huygens — Leibniz — ...

Through van Schooten, Marin Mersenne is also a step-great¹⁶-grandsupervisor.

My own former PhD students, with Leibniz as their great¹⁴-grandsupervisor (etc.), are: Karla Hemming, Ben Cowling, Simon Bond, Costas Kallis, Maria Costa, Miland Joshi and Hasinur Rahaman Khan.

Many thanks to Simon Bond for researching the mathematical genealogy, and to Tony O'Hagan for correcting my Erdös number.