Keith Briggs

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. I am an Alan Tayler Visiting Lecturer in the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford. This is me on Wikipedia, and this is me on Google Scholar. My other interests include the linguistic history of place-names, harpsichording, and cycling. I have been a cartotaller since 2008-06-08. My pronoun is anaphoric.

what's new?

• 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 “The etymology of ‘girl’: two more ideas” is online.
• My paper “Two coastal terms of continental origin: shingle and dene” is online.
• My paper “The first girls in England” is online. This was the most-read paper in the OUP journal Notes & Queries in October 2020!
• 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.
• Percy Hide Reaney 1890–1968.
• JEPNS 51 (2019) contents.
• CELTIC-NEXT project AIMM; AIMM website.
• 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:

  

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.