Mark Muldoon Reader, School of Mathematics Teaching: Schedule, Autumn 2018 The links below lead to online materials for my current courses Discrete Maths (MATH20902: 2nd Year Maths) Room: Room 2.130, Alan Turing Building (number 46 on this campus map) Phone: (0161) 306 3646 (44 161 306 3646   from overseas) Email: M.Muldoon@Manchester.ac.uk

There are various factors at work, but part of the answer to the problem of dinosaur gigantism seems to be that they had unusually efficient lungs, which worked on the same design found in birds. The lungs of a bird are “unidirectional” — they do not work like a bellows, but circulate air in one direction, thanks to a complex arrangement involving a series of air sacs that extend into special cavities in the bones. This means that birds can extract oxygen from air on inhalation and exhalation — “twice the bang for the buck, a continuous supply of energy-sustaining oxygen”. The fossil bones of some large dinosaurs show similar cavities, which are called pneumatic fenestrae: “They are exactly the same structures as in modern birds, and they can only be made by air sacs,” Brusatte explains. They also made the skeleton lighter. In fact, the bones of some large sauropods “were little more than honeycombs, featherweight but still strong”, hollowed out by the elaboration of “ultra-efficient lungs that could take in enough oxygen to stoke their metabolism at huge size”. Beyond birds and some dinosaurs, no other animals have the same design. Its unique efficiency seems to have helped sauropods to grow into giants, giving a T. Rex the bursts of energy needed to strike its prey from ambush and bite down with a force of three thousand pounds per tooth; today, the design makes it possible for modern birds to fly enormous distances in freezing and rarefied air.

From a review of Steve Brusatte's The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: The Untold Story of a Lost World, by Francis Gooding.

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Autumn 2018

Weekday	9:00 → 10:00	10:00 → 11:00	11:00 → 12:00	12:00 → 1:00	1:00 → 2:00	2:00 → 3:00	3:00 → 4:00	4:00 → 5:00
Monday	Paszek & Roberts Labs Listeria Meeting Michael Smith: A.2026			Discrete Maths Lecture Alan Turing: G.107		Amber Reid (Project Student)	Discrete Maths Problems Class Alan Turing: G.107	Rajenki Das
Tuesday		Xiaomeng Li (Project Student)	Linear Algebra Supervision (my advisees) Roscoe: 4.2	Janaki Dodia (Project Student)			CURE Group Lab Meeting Various venues
Wednesday				Apps of Pure Maths Seminar Frank Adams 1
Thursday		Office Hours 10:00–11:30 Available to meet tutees Alan Turing 2.130		Discrete Maths Problems Class Simon Building: 3.62		Discrete Maths Lecture Schuster: Moseley Theatre
Friday		Stats & Machine Learning II Lecture Uni Place: 3.210		Kieran Jones (Project Student)		Stats & Machine Learning II Lab Ellen Wilkinson: B3.17