I am professionally a mathematician. Some of my interests are graph theory and stochastic processes for network applications; distributed algorithms; wireless systems; and mathematical computing, including computational number theory and combinatorial optimization. Until recently I was a visiting lecturer in the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford, and an Industrial Fellow in the Institute for Mathematical Innovation at the University of Bath. This is me on Wikipedia, me on Google Street View, me on Google Street View again, and me on Google Scholar. My other interests include the linguistic history of English place-names (especially of Suffolk), harpsichording, and cycling. I have been a cartotaller (total abstainer from the use of cars) since 2008-06-08. My pronoun is anaphoric.

What's new?

• 2024-12-12: My long-awaited paper The Ipswich ancestors of Geoffrey Chaucer is now published!
• 2024-12-13: travel 2025.
• 2024-01-01: travel 2024.
• 2024-01-01: I'm participating in the BeyondTheEdge project.
• 2024-10-19: I presented on the history of the word “road” at the SNSBI York meeting. A recording of my talk is on YouTube.
• 2024-09-06: I've started a YouTube channel for my harpsichord playing.
• 2024-07-07: I'm now on Facebook. Lots of pictures there.
• 2024-07-06: There's a new photo of me (taken 2024-06-03 in Antwerp) on this website for the first time since 2003. (The old one is here).
• 2024-07-01: I've joined Humanists UK.
• 2024-06-26: I've been elected to the council of the IMA.
• 2023-12-16: JEPNS contents now has volume 54.
• 2023-09-30: Bodleian Suffolk charters (a new digitization project which I initiated).
• 2023-04-28: The BeGREEN project in which I am a partner now has a website.
• 2023-03-05: Percy Hide Reaney 1890–1968 is updated.
• 2022-12-12: My paper Silly Suffolk is now out (PSIAH 45.2 (2022) 295). I show that this commonly used epithet is very probably of 19th-century origin and has no recorded medieval history as usually alleged.
• 2022-11-15: The AIMM project (see also here) has finished, but the AIMM 5G system-level simulator is now open-source and on github.
• 2022-08-10: The new Suffolk History Hub which I helped create is now live.
• 2022-08-03: My 2021 paper The etymology of “girl”: two more ideas has been made open access and is now back in the OUP “most read” chart again (number 2 on 2022-09-10, number 1 on 2022-09-19, down to 3 on 2022-10-31, back to 2 on 2022-11-09, back up to 1 on 2022-12-24, out of the chart by 2023-03-19).
• 2022-01-31: My note “The expression to fanny about” is online.
• 2022-01-19: The history of the word girl.
• 2022-01-11: My book An index to personal names in English place-names is now downloadable for free!
• 2021-12-24: My paper “Thelnetham and Whelnetham in Suffolk: early Christian sites?” is online.
• 2021-12-24: My paper “The earliest records of Newmarket” is online.
• 2021-12-17: My paper (with P. McClure) “Fucfast, flemings daughter, and sowters dowghter: some sixteenth-century insults” is online.
• 2021-12-14: My paper “The etymology of releet ‘road junction’” is online.
• 2021-08-14: My paper “Middle English shiteburgh `a privy'” is online.
• 2021-04-14: My new book An index to personal names in English place-names is now published.
• My paper “Old English collective plant-names in place-names” is online.
• My paper “The river Mearcella in Suffolk, once again” is online.
• My paper “The wolverine: an animal-name from a personal name?” is online.
• My paper (with A. Middleton, J. Dawes, A. Járai) “How close is the nearest node in a wireless network?” is online.
• My paper “Two coastal terms of continental origin: shingle and dene” is online.
• My paper “Snavergate: a unique Old Danish term in medieval Suffolk” is online.
• My paper “Middle English rōde ‘a ride’ and its compounds” is online.
• My paper “The etymology of ‘beach’” is online.
• My python code for quantile estimation (to go with my Mathematics Today article).
• My proposal for a document date descriptor (DDD).
• My name on the map of the Firth of Forth by Greenvile Collins c.1693, reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland:

  

• 5 Euston Ave video

History of this website: this site goes back to an original version of about 1994, when it was common for mathematicians and physicists to have their own website (and not common for any other websites to exist). About 1998 I switched to maintaining the site with a perl script given to me by David MacKay, whose posthumous website also built with this script is still alive. I have had to remove the following files due to excessive automated downloading: EPN_maps/English_placename_element_distribution.pdf; images/Roman_road_maps.pdf; documents/BenjaminHu.pdf; documents/Suffolk_place-name_course_slides_00.pdf; documents/AS_charters_junirg.pdf; documents/AS_charters_beowulf.pdf; sawyer.pkl. Please email me if you would like a copy of these.