Happy new year

Happy new year, everyone. Although I can’t see the end of the Covid tunnel yet, I do hope that for all of us the new year brings better times.

One big change for me in the coming year is that, from the beginning of March, I will only be working 25% time. (Of course, it probably doesn’t mean I will be doing any less, but it might mean I have a bit more time for the things that I want to be doing.) In parallel, this years presentation of the Advanced Combinatorics module in St Andrews will be the last in the current form. From next academic year, this module will only be lectured every second year; it will alternate with a new module on Set Theory and Logic. So it will be no longer feasible to have three syllabuses on Advanced Combinatorics which rotate; I will have to take the best bits and combine them into one.

Also, and perhaps incidentally, I reach my three-quarter century next month. (This a milestone which is significant only because it is three times the product of the numbers of fingers on my hands.)

There are a couple of significant new developments about graphs defined on groups, which I hope to tell you about in the near future. These are partly due to the fact that a couple of group theorists have picked up the topic. So there may be yet more news soon.