Meet the scientists!

There is a lot of variety in animal sex lives! To give you an idea, here are some examples of weird and wonderful behaviour. Peahens fancy peacocks because of their bright colour and huge tail, which is strange because these things would make the peacock more likely to get caught and eaten by a predator. In seahorses, it’s the males that get pregnant, not the females. In snails, which are both male and female, part of the courtship involves harpooning one another with love darts. Finally, in preying mantids, the female has to bite the head off the male before the end of sex! There are lots of examples of weird things that animals do, but they all have one thing in common: they came about through evolution. I use maths to try and find out what it is about these behaviours that makes them so good, to see why they started, and why they continue.

There’s a lot of variation in my days, so I don’t really have a typical routine. However, I am usually woken up by my girlfriend who is getting ready to go to work. Then I have a cup of tea, check to see if I’ve got any emails over night, and then go onto campus. My office is at University College London, near Euston Station. I spend a lot of my day sitting at my desk, which is covered in bits of paper, books, pens, and pencils. My time is taken up largely with writing equations out and then crossing them out and throwing the paper away when I get it wrong, which happens a lot. When I get it right, however, it feels great! Sometimes I have to write up the work on the computer, either for a scientific paper or for a presentation to other scientists.

I also spend time during the day talking to the other people in my office, making cups of tea (I drink lots and lots of cups of tea in an average day), answering emails, and going to seminars. In the evening I get home and cook dinner for my girlfriend (who usually gets home later than me as well as leaving the flat earlier than me), or go out and see friends.