# Posts

• Fitting ranks to a distribution

This is a brief blog post to describe how to scale a set of ranks to some distribution using a percentage point function. This is in the category of blog posts of me writing myself a note so that I remember how to do this when I need to.

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• The fallacy of a meritocracy (using game theory)

Today we hosted Dame Professor Celia Hoyles who gave a talk at the launch event of Cardiff’s new Mathematics Education Research Group (MERG). Amongst many interesting things the topic of the gender imbalance in Mathematics came up. In this post I’ll use a game theoretic model of evolution to describe one aspect of lack of diversity: the fallacy that is a meritocracy.

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• The effect of goats (on the Monty hall problem)

I’ve just written a 3 page example coursework submission as a demo for my first year students. This is for a course called “Computer for Mathematics” which aims to introduce mathematics students to programming techniques useful to mathematicians (in Python). The particular example I chose to write about is one (of many possibly) generalisation of the Monty Hall problem. I’m rewriting what I did here in case it’s of interest to anyone.

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• Allocating final year projects to students

Every year, our final year students are offered the chance to do a research project. These are credit baring and take the place of another taught course. Allocating students to project is not simple task as many students might want to work on the same project for example. In this blog post I’ll describe the mathematical model used to quantify how good an allocation is and then show how we used Python (specifically the pulp library) to get the best possible allocation.

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• Using Python in R to study Game Theory

I just got back from a great camping holiday and as usual have started my return by working through email. One particular email has asked if it was possible to use the Axelrod library through the statistical programming language: R. I have here and there heard of a variety of libraries that let you call R from Python and vice versa so I thought it was worth experimenting and seeing exactly how to do this. This blog post will be a very brief demo of using the R package: reticulate to interface to the Python library for studying the Iterated Prisoners Dilemma.

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