When the Local Governance (Scotland) Bill [2] was introduced in the Scottish Parliament it included most (but not all) of the STV counting rules used for District Council elections in Northern Ireland [3]. Among those included were the provisions for the transfer of surplus votes by the Gregory Method, applied only to the ‘last parcel’ of ballot papers for a consequential surplus [4]. During th...

Let a sufficiently smooth function f on [−1, 1] be sampled at n + 1 equispaced points, and let k ≥ 0 be given. An Euler–Maclaurin interpolant to the data is defined, consisting of a sum of a degree k algebraic polynomial and a degree n trigonometric polynomial, which deviates from f by O(n−k) and whose integral is equal to the order k Euler–Maclaurin approximation of the integral of f . This in...

Gregory Goodwin Pincus [4], one of the original researchers responsible for the development of the first oral contraceptive pill [5], was born in Woodbine, New Jersey, on 19 April 1903 to Russian Jewish parents. In 1924 Pincus received his BS degree from Cornell University [6], and in 1927 he received his MS and PhD from Harvard University [7], having studied under William Ernest Castle [8] and...

Greg was a virtuoso lecturer who delivered superb solo performances over which he labored with an obsession. He created just the right slides that would help “tell the story,” and oh, how Greg loved to tell a story. ButwhatGreg lovedbestwastheroleof impresario.Hewas a wizard at bringing the right people with diversified talents and tastes together and setting before them a common and ambitious ...