MY LATEST POSTS
140. The power of curiosity: burning down houses and blowing up schools.
Polymathic scientist George Whitesides, consultant to many commercial ventures, has written a beautiful essay on the power of curiosity: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/anie.201800684 It begins with the story of how, as a child, he had heard that...
Life, REF, and the half-loaf principle
One of my favourite writers is the Russian-born Englishman S.J. "Skid" Simon. Unless you are a bridge player, you have probably never heard of him, although he wrote many murder mysteries in the period before the Second World War, the best-known being "A Bullet in the...
Systemic Risk: What it Means and What we can Do
Some basic references for a talk that I delivered to the Aon Benfield conference “Risk Re-imagined” (Gold Coast, Australia, September 18-20 (2017)) IRGC Concept Note “Preparing for Future Catastrophes”...
Chickens’ Guts and Chefs’ Tools
Art imitating nature: how chefs treat seeds in just the same ways that seed-eating birds have been doing for millions of years: https://youtu.be/RMuAx4XVa08 My talk at the 2018 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. Start at 2'50" if you want to...
MY LATEST POSTS
MINI STORIES FROM SCIENCE
140. The power of curiosity: burning down houses and blowing up schools.
Polymathic scientist George Whitesides, consultant to many commercial ventures, has written a beautiful essay on the power of curiosity: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/anie.201800684 It begins with the story of how, as a child, he had heard that...
STRAY THOUGHTS
Life, REF, and the half-loaf principle
One of my favourite writers is the Russian-born Englishman S.J. "Skid" Simon. Unless you are a bridge player, you have probably never heard of him, although he wrote many murder mysteries in the period before the Second World War, the best-known being "A Bullet in the...
PLANNING FOR LIFE’S CRISES
Systemic Risk: What it Means and What we can Do
Some basic references for a talk that I delivered to the Aon Benfield conference “Risk Re-imagined” (Gold Coast, Australia, September 18-20 (2017)) IRGC Concept Note “Preparing for Future Catastrophes”...
FOOD & GASTRONOMY
Chickens’ Guts and Chefs’ Tools
Art imitating nature: how chefs treat seeds in just the same ways that seed-eating birds have been doing for millions of years: https://youtu.be/RMuAx4XVa08 My talk at the 2018 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. Start at 2'50" if you want to...
MY BOOKS
My books are aimed to help people see and understand the world through a scientist’s eyes, with a good leavening of humour, anecdote and the personal stories.
TESTIMONIALS
“Fisher is a master story-teller, making difficult scientific concepts seem simple through elegant exposition. Crashes, Crises and Calamities addresses the challenge of disaster prediction … by a brilliant and engaging integration of diverse scientific perspectives.”
Simon A. Levin, Moffett Professor of Biology, Princeton University; author of Fragile Dominion“[Rock, Paper, Scissors is a] tour de force of exposition, with many amusing and enlightening vignettes of the application of game theory to real-world interactions in the home, amongst friends, in business, and in international relations.”
Professor Robert Marks, Winner of computer tournament on strategies for effective cooperation“Scientists are constantly trying to make science accessible to the general public, but rarely are they as successful as physicist [Len] Fisher.”
Library Journal Review“From locusts watching Star Wars to Murphy’s Law of Management, The Perfect Swarm hits all the buttons … a wonderful tour through the new mathematics of swarms, flocks and crowds.”
Ian Stewart, Author, Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities