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Bernard Scott was born in London on 27 August 1915. At the time of his birth his name was Schultz. He was the only son of a Jewish family of fur and skin merchants who lived in North London; he had two sisters.Bernard attended the City of London School from 1925 to 1934. From school records it appears that he evinced an early taste for argument and debate. There is also testimony of his enthusiasm for sport, especially rugby. His talents for mathematics and for chess became evident at an early stage. While mathematics became his profession, it was the game of chess that aroused in him an abiding passion and made him a first-class player throughout his life.Bernard won an Open Scholarship in Mathematics to Magdalene College, Cambridge. He graduated with First Class Honours and a Distinction in Part III of the Mathematical Tripos in 1937. While pursuing his mathematical studies with evident success, he continued to cultivate his talent as a chess player. B. H. Neumann, who was a research student at Cambridge at that time, relates that he and Bernard Schultz (as he then was) went to London to take part in a weekend tournament and returned with all the prize money between them (about £7). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Thames Water ring main extension is a 4·5 km long tunnel from Stoke Newington, in the London borough of Hackney, to New River Head in Finsbury, in the London borough of Islington. The 2·85 m i.d. tunnel was excavated by an earth pressure balance tunnel-boring machine (TBM) at depths between 40 and 60 m below the surface. Surface settlements along the route were measured by precise levelling, and were found to be small. It was therefore even more important to measure these settlements as accurately as possible, in order to provide informed estimates of subsurface movements induced in third-party underground structures much closer to the tunnel horizon. Because of the relatively large magnitude of the background movements measured, when compared with the small tunnel-induced settlements, it was necessary to adopt a rigorous statistical method to fit a Gaussian curve to the data. This exploited the analogy of the 'error function' to define the Gaussian curve parameters and . In all, 13 tunnels were underpassed successfully by the TBM, all within the 'conservative expected value' predictions, and without incident. The predictions and structural monitoring schemes undertaken for the High Speed 1 tunnels near Corsica Street and the Northern line tunnels near Angel station are described in the paper. It was found that the surface and subsurface trough width parameter did not vary with depth as predicted: therefore a new relationship is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea for this collection of memories of E. H. Thompson began as a suggestion to potential contributors for anything from “a couple of sentences to a couple of paragraphs”. Both their willingness to write and the length of some contributions show how influential Thompson has been in the lives of so many of his colleagues and students. Contributors include two past-presidents of the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing and six past-presidents of the Photogrammetric Society. Three longer essays are published as separate contributions to this feature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports the findings of a retrospective study of 'tracked' grouping in a mathematics department in a co-educational comprehensive school in Greater London. Tracking consisted here of just two tracks, a 'fast track' for the top 25-30% of a cohort, and a 'mixed track' for the remainder. The article outlines the reasons for introducing tracking and explores its effects through interviews with teachers and data on the progress of students from age 14 to age 16. The teachers reported that tracking impacted differently on different students, and this is borne out by the quantitative data. It was not possible to provide for 'setting' across all the mathematics classrooms in the focal cohort, and therefore one mixed-ability class was created. The use of analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) models shows that fast-track students were not significantly advantaged by their placement in these tracks, but the progress of students in the mixed-ability group showed a significant interaction between progress and prior attainment, with placement in the mixed-ability group conferring a significant advantage on lower attaining students, while the disadvantage to higher attaining students was much smaller. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on mathematics and its three semiotic systems in London, England. The three semiotic systems are verbal language, algebraic notations and visual forms. The systematic functional linguistics (SFL) have been developed to further understand visual forms. It has been extended to include non-verbal modes. It will aid to investigate what visual representations mean in mathematical texts. Several linguistic approaches have been made to help students analyze geometrical problems through diagrams and shapes. These are Morgan's linguistic approach, Kress and van Leeuwen mutimodality approach and Sfrad's commognition approach. The framework is currently on a pilot stage in the city for analysis.