Chris reminds us that in the world of social scientists, British sociologists are generally considered the shabbiest. This prompts me to consider just how far I’ve come; although I’m British, am a sociologist, and routinely wear crimpolene, in a former life I was a mathematician.

Ah the memories. The splendid Keith Hannabus and Frances Kirwan did their best to teach me algebra and analysis, despite the fact that I was drunk and wouldn’t learn.

That said, I woke up this morning with this algebraic ditty in my head, to the tune of These Are a Few of My Favourite Things:

Matrices, Integers, Rationals and Reals,

Polynomials and all their Ideals,

Real valued functions and similiar things,

These are a few of my favourite rings.

This is the bit where mathematicians giggle. Everyone else will undoubtedly find the joke funny after reading a brief introduction to rings.