These past two years have seen the bicentenaries of Michael Faraday, Charles Babbage and John Frederick Herschel. A fourth contemporary, who deserves to rank with these, is George Green, the bicentenary of whose birth will be marked by the dedication of a plaque in Westminster Abbey. His memorial will be in proximity to those commemorating Newton, Kelvin, Faraday and Clerk Maxwell. Those to the Herschels (William and John) and Stokes are close by. Green’s memorial designates him “Mathematician and Physicist”. Most mathematicians will know of Green’s theorem and Green’s functions; physicists find his papers seminal to the study of, for example, solid state physics and elasticity and, since the mid-twentieth century, Green’s functions have become an indispensable technique for those working in nuclear physics.

Mathematica is a computer software system for symbolic manipulation and numerical computation; it has excellent graphics, a high-level, mathematically-oriented programming language and, very importantly, it takes seriously the need for work to be interactive, properly presented and communicated. This article is in fact prepared as a Mathematica “notebook”. An extensive library of supporting software “packages” has been developed, and several books about using it are now available.

“There is really only one Game, the Game in which each of us is a player acting out his role. The Game is Leela, the universal play of cosmic energy.” Thus begins Harish Johari in Leela: the game of selfknowledge, a serious commentary and religious interpretation of the Hindu board game Leela. Leela is essentially the game Snakes and Ladders, which in the U.S. is the popular children’s game of snakes and ladders, England’s famous indoor sport,” for 50ø in 1943 by the Milton Bradley Company of Springfield, Massachusetts. This game is really a 101 state absorbing Markov chain, which is amenable to mathematical as well as moral analysis. In what follows we investigate only the mathematical side of this diversion, specifically the expected playing time.