It feels sometimes like waiting for the bus before there was real-time information about where the next one was, when eventually three would arrive together, so the first one is the standard warning which you may not need to read, and given the length of Coco’s musings he knows that at least one of you, dear readers, having chastised him off on several occasions for his wordiness, shall not read it. Many of you will be very well aware of the issue, and perhaps have no need to read any more than the next few words.

If you get a friend request from Coco (but unlikely if you are already friends 😉), or one of his other friends, followers or followed, or one impersonating one of these or impersonating him, then please check it out carefully first. Check it out even if it comes as what appears to be a legitimate friend suggestion from the moderator or owner of the source.

One of you not so long ago spotted a fake, impersonating public profile, from which Coco, amongst he supposes many others, had received a befriending request, and kindly advised of its existence. Thank you for doing so.

Coco has recently become aware that a number of such profiles has been set up. For the sake of privacy he shall not disclose here any names, it is not his place to do so, but advise that though you may find similar names or descriptions among his friends, the impersonations and impersonators are not there. Beware though for some impersonating profiles may have friends with other fake, impersonating profiles which help them to look legitimate.

It is perhaps worth checking from time to time for pages similar to your own – why would anyone set up a fake page of me you might ask, so does he? but people do. Coco thought little of the first one that he saw, at first, but there are many dangers here. Some public fora have tools to report pages which impersonate others. Whether they are effective, remains to be seen.

As for the other two omnibus, they have already left the stop should you have spent time reading this post whilst waiting…

Happy Christmas

Some say that mathematics is difficult, and the more proficient you become in it, rather like English, the more difficult it becomes to comprehend. When questions such as What is 1? are asked and you are told that One is -e^iπ, you begin the grasp with credulity the ineffable complexity that is mathematics. You may then be told that Euler’s formula precisely defines all real numbers x by { e^ix = cos(x) + i sin(x) }. A mathematician somewhere will complain that having placed the equality within braces Coco thus invalidated what he had just proposed. Ah well, such is the world of the mathematician.

The word epic springs to mind when setting out on the voyage of discovery that is mathematics, but have you ever considered whether epic is the right word to use? Epic comes to us from the Greek. We speak of epic poetry. For the Greek that is a poem that tells a story. It may be a short story or it may be a long story such as that of Ulysses (Homer’s Odyssey).