Sport
I've represented Scotland in cross-country, decathlon and several individual track and field events as a junior athlete. My most recent title was Scottish Universities discus champion during my masters at St Andrews.
Here's a link to my Power of 10 page.
During the last few years I've explored some of the alternative events available on the athletics circuit. I regularly compete in the world and European championships for icosathlon, which I won in 2014, '16 and '18. My performance from 2014 is still a junior world record.
I received my first official British vest in 2018 in a different sport, though, after I qualified for the world championships in obstacle course racing. Having only ever obstacled in those qualifiers and the championship race itself, I'd be interested in seeing whether this event has more potential for me, but injuries have stopped me so far. Instead, in 2019 I organised a new type of competition for fun at my alma mater, Cambridge University. Athletes from the rival university at Oxford also took part in a contest of random-object throwing. The day was entertaining and we hope to make it an annual fixture.
Consequently, I now also maintain the results website for the new International Association of Random Object Throwing.
TV and Netflix
I answered a casting call in 2017 to take part in a new genre of TV show. A “living history” series had only been done once before as a blend of historical documentary and reality show, but not in such an interesting historical era. I was cast as myself in Secret Agent Selection: WW2 which ran on BBC2 for 5 weeks in early 2018. The show was picked up by Netflix later in the year as Churchill's Secret Agents: The New Recruits. While not a worldwide phenomenon, the show got some attention in the local rag.
Thanks to the narrator of the show, Douglas Henshall, my credit gives me a Bacon number of 3.
Maths
I took a break from serious maths after undergrad in order to focus on learning the basics of computer science. Recently, though, I've had a bit more time to explore some of favourite areas.
Here's a paper I wrote about moving shapes through a mathematical orchard as demonstrated at the top of this page. Publication is pending with a couple of smaller journals.
During the 2020 COVID lockdowns I looked into finding the highest and lowest possible scores for complete games of solitaire Scrabble: playing all 100 tiles without the messiness of penalties and deductions in competitive games. I wasn't able to improve on the existing records of 5876 or 216, but here's what I found. I also did a complete computational analysis of the maximum scores using a single tile for each square of the Scrabble board.
Coding
It's my job now so I can't talk about a lot of my more recent work, but there's a link to my old website from uni days at the bottom of the page. Some of the projects were for coursework but most were for my own enjoyment. Personal favourites include Sudoku Spelling, the UK/US spell checker and a simple origami simulator that replicates the effect of one of my favourite online games.
If you're looking for one of my web apps, I don't link to them from my main page in case they get accidentally stumbled upon. Send me a message if you know me as I like to keep them a little more private.