Hi! My name is Colin, and I am a mathematician.
I write books and articles to make maths as clear as possible for as many as possible.
Writing about maths wasn’t originally part of the plan. I was an academic for a while – I worked on NASA’s Living with a Star program at Montana State University, keeping the world safe from solar flares1 – but grew disillusioned with writing papers that six people would ever read, and doing science that might possibly lead to breakthroughs a decade down the line.
So I came home in 2008 without much of a plan. I started blogging and tutoring to keep myself busy while I looked for a proper job, and found before very long that helping people understand things (and working out the odd ninja trick) was way more rewarding than fixing other people’s broken code.
My writing was picked up by the For Dummies people and I wound up writing Basic Maths For Dummies in 2011, followed by several other books in the same yellow covers. A couple of popular maths books, Cracking Mathematics2 and The Maths Behind3 followed.
These days I live in Weymouth, on the south coast of England, with my partner and two young mathematicians. If I’m not writing or parenting, you can probably find me running at a slightly-slower-than-respectable pace along the excellent local system of cycle paths.