eurostar static

It was most refreshing to hear the (very quiet) conversation of an Australian family sitting in the Eurostar to Paris across me, after being submitted, while waiting to board the train, to an horrid phone conversation of a father (?!) with his teenage child trying to be excused from a math test the same afternoon. (The  level of the insults launched at the child would have qualified as child abuse. And cannot be printed here!)

[After entering the very first tunnel, a few minutes after departure] Are we entering France now?

[While still in England] Are we going to see the sea?

[Once in Northern France, crossing the wheat fields of Le Nord] This is very green, but where is the cattle?

simulation in Gare du Nord [jatp]

“those” coincidences

Last Thursday night, after a friendly dinner closing the ICMS workshop, I was rushing back to Pollock Halls to catch some sleep before a very early flight. When crossing North Bridge, on top of Waverley station, I then spotted in the crowd a well-known face of a fellow statistician from Cambridge University, on an academic visit to the University of Edinburgh that was completely unrelated with the workshop. Then, today, on my way back from submitting a visa request at the Indian embassy in Paris, I took the RER train for one stop between Gare du Nord and Chatelet. When I stood up from my seat and looked behind me, a senior (and most famous) mathematician was sitting right there, in deep conversation with a colleague about algorithms… Just two of “those” coincidences. (Edinburgh may be propitious to coincidences: at the last ICMS workshop I attended, I ended up in the same Indian restaurant as Marc Suchard, who also was on an academic visit to the University of Edinburgh that was completely unrelated with the workshop!)