I had the same reaction. It looks like they fit a spline to the data, and then took the analytical derivative of the spline. But there are other ways to do it like locally weighted regression. In general estimating derivatives from real world data is noisy, ill conditioned, should be treated carefully.

Definitely. Turing, Rayleigh, Wiles, Dirac, Thomson, Rutherford, Fleming, Crick... who cares about any of their work? They’re all just hacks.

How much of the work which made those people famous was actually made in the UK? If a UK citizen is working and/or living abroad, can the work they do really be “credited”, so to speak, to the UK?

Conversely, should not UK get the credit, if non-UK citizens have immigrated to the UK and do their work at UK institutions?

Hawking spent his entire professional life in the UK. Wiles bounced around between Princeton, Paris, and Oxford, but he was educated up through his PhD in the UK.

From my perspective as an American in number theory, it seems there is no shortage of strong people coming from UK, Australia, Germany, France, India, and China, but there are many who come to the US and stay here. Anecdotally, it seems rare for a very strong person in the US to move elsewhere, unless it is back to their home country.

I'm surprised you think this. UCL is consistently top-notch in a number of fields.

Example: did you know their software powers >90% of fMRI studies in cognitive neuroscience? The Wellcome Trust is a major part of why this happens, and that's very much a part of British research.

Nationalistic trolling will get you banned here. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

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