About Me

I'm from Coventry. I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Bristol, and my PhD at the University of St Andrews. I'm a former astrophysicist with a Erdos number of 4 (as follows):

1. Erdos, Shapiro
2. Shapiro, Tegmark
3. Scranton R, Tegmark, Loveday
4. Hill, Loveday

After finishing my second degree, I moved to Cambridge to work in a computationally heavy bit of the finance industry, and I lived there for ten years. I'm currently resident in Coventry.

Offline, my principle hobby is gardening. I am a deeply unsuccessful gardener, and I can regale you with stories of blights and pestilences that would not be out of place in the Old Testament. In recent years, I've lost:

• A full bed of chard to slugs
• Large chunks of a brocolli plant to pigeons
• An entire crop of ripening tomatoes to tomato blight
• The crop from an old pear tree, each year, to fire blight
• Half of the crop of an old Worcester pearmain apple tree, most years, to coddling moth
• Two crowns of rhubarb, either to frost or to crown rot

My pride and joy is a Wyken Pippin apple tree that was bought in 2010 from a seller from Walcot Nursery and is currently growing in my uncle's back garden. The Wyken pippin is not a particularly distinguished apple, known neither for its disease resistance or its heavy cropping. It is, however, an apple that originated in Coventry, and was believed to have gone extinct for many years until a tree matching its recorded characteristics was found on the Isle of Wight. For a long time, a pub on one of the busiest roads in the city was named after it. Most apple trees start producing apples within 3 or 4 years - it took until 2020 for this one to crop.