The course feedback can be seen on the course webpage. There were eight respondents, and the average overall grade was 3,75 / 5, which is good. The topics and the projects were considered interesting and beneficial, and people were pleased with the teaching. The course was considered too easy for five credits, and the general sloppiness was critizised. No surprises! I was especially pleased with the last comment to question 6. The answers to questions 7 and 8 were constructive and will certainly help in improving the course next year.

Once again a big thanks to everyone! The credits for the course should have appeared, or will appear today.

The credits have been sent forward. They should appear in the register during next week.

At some point I said that answering the questionnaire is required for passing. That's not true, but if you are among the passers and don't answer the questionnaire (it closes next Thursday), I will impose bad karma on you.

The normalizing constant has been corrected in the week 4 lectures.

A minor loose end: I never actually showed the conjecture that I mentioned during the last lecture. It is found in http://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.3752.pdf on page 17, Remark 3.8.

A big thanks to everyone that attended, and also to the people at the department! This course was my dream come true. I will probably post some comments on the feedback when I see it a week from now. Have a good summer!

This time no video, only serious business. We have two more weeks of lectures / exercises before the projects. Here's what I try to accomplish during the lectures:

• Tue: Complete the uniform case
• Wed & Tue: Countably infinite juggling Markov chains (remove the throw height bound)
• Wed: Scale the process from discrete to continuous (whatever that means, we'll see).

About the projects. Here's what I expect from the presentations (I will talk with the code people separately):

• Clear notes (about 4-5 pages depending on text size)
• Practice your presentation!

One lecture (45 minutes) is a very short time. For example, take a look at my notes. They are usually 6-8 pages per 90 minutes. My style is relatively slow, but anyway. If you want to be clear, you have to think quite carefully about what to say. People often run out of time in their talks, which can become rather awkward. The bottom line is that writing notes is not enough, you should also spend some time experimenting with how long it really takes to explain things. For example, go through the first planned 15 minutes by talking aloud and imagining the real situation. When you can do it calmly in 12 minutes, then you are ready for the real thing. Thereafter make sure that you can similarly do the rest of the presentation too.

I should now have contacted everybody about their projects. Updated a tentative presentation schedule to the webpage, it can be modified whenever needed. The exercises for next week will have to wait until Monday, sorry about that. Next week's lectures will contain:

• Tue: Prime juggling patterns. Virtual juggling patterns. Affine permutations.
• Wed: Juggling Markov chains.

Will soon add another video to the thread below. Have an excellent weekend!

Okay. Today's lectures are on the website, and the answers to the opening questionnaire look very nice indeed. More about that tomorrow.

This thread will start a series of juggling videos that I consider classical. Here is the first one about dropping the requirement that particles travel forward in time. Made by Phil Edwards, a juggling mathematician. Enjoy!

P.S. The two most relevant juggling math papers NOT available on the arXiv are available here and here.

Updated some simulator code to the webpage. The first exercises are also there. A short curriculum for the first week:

• Tue: Opening. Introduction to periodic siteswaps.
• Wed: More on periodic siteswaps. Siteswap state graphs. Introduction to random siteswaps.
• Thu: Exercises and project planning.

Have a good weekend!

Just noticed a new paper on the arXiv, looks quite interesting: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.01426.pdf

The course starts in a week from now. Currently there are eight registered participants, and a few more have told me that they will attend. This seems very optimal. The aim is that everybody passes the course by completing a project of one form or another.

The opening lecture is important: I will present the big picture and we will collectively agree on the practical matters. In fact, I feel that attending the opening lecture is compulsory! The necessity of attending all the other sessions can be negotiated.

The lectures (Tue, Wed) form a coherent theory of periodic and random siteswap patterns. The curriculum and the lecture notes will be updated to the course webpage as the course proceeds.

On the other hand, the exercise sessions (Thu) are not yet definitely set. I will publish a first set of exercises that relate to the first lectures, but how the first exercise session will actually proceed - we'll see about that! Anyway, the five remaining Thursdays should be mostly reserved for people to present their project work.

That's all for now, more to come soon. Feel free to comment. Anonymous comments should work, but not necessarily with all browsers (such as Linux Firefox).