The Lawrence Medal

The Richard Webster Medal

There have recently been moves afoot among evolutionary biologists to stop speaking of ‘Darwin’s theory of evolution’ and, instead, to call it ‘Darwin’s law of evolution’. This is to stymie creationists who like to say ‘evolution is only a theory’. Now I am all in favour of stymieing creationists, but I think that this idea is misguided. The underlying assumption is that the use of the word ‘La...

The Myth and the Medal

The weekend before the start of the 2014 International Congress of Mathematicians, I contributed an op-ed to the New York Times about the history of the Fields Medal. The article treated two topics that are familiar to many mathematicians, if not necessarily to the general public. I suggested that a previously unrecognized connection between these two stories, discovered in the course of my res...

The first BMA Gold Medal.

The Aboo Lawrence School

This school was founded by Sir Henry Lawrence in 1854, and has completed the eighteenth year of its existence. The objects of the institution are to provide a refuge from the debilitating effects of a tropical climate, and a plain, practical education and Christian training for the children and orphans of soldiers serving in Rajpootana and Western India. The report for the year 1871-72, which h...

Digressions around a medal.

"First-Aid Community Training" (F.A.C.T.) scheme has been floated to teach the general public correct attitudes towards safety in daily life. This scheme should reduce the number of accidents, and save the country millions of pounds. It is surely an intriguing paradox that in an expanding environment of state medical services a private army of trained unpaid volunteers should be flourishing. Th...