These are the show notes for episode 39 of the Travels in a Mathematical World Podcast. 39 is the smallest number whose sum of digits is larger than that of its square. More about 39 from Number Gossip.

The podcast resumes from the summer break and we hear from Beatrice Pelloni, Reader in Applied Mathematics at University of Reading, who I met at the Women in Mathematics Day 2009 and who spoke to me about her career, the topic of her talk at that event (“Generalised Fourier transforms and boundary value problems”) and a little about being both a mother to young children and a mathematician.

If you are interested to learn more you can get some basics on Fourier transforms from Wolfram Mathworld. (Having brushed up, you might find this cartoon from xkcd amusing: “Fourier“). Boundary value problems are a broad topic; a definition of “Boundary Value Problem” can be found at Wolfram MathWorld and lots of reference material can be found online or in your university library. If you’re really serious, you can read a paper by Beatrice on “Linear and nonlinear generalized Fourier transforms” and there are several papers on boundary value problems on Beatrice’s website.

If you are interested in learning more about the contribution of women to mathematics you might be interested to learn related issues are explored in the latest iSquared, which is a special issue on “Women in Maths”.

You can find out more about my work with the IMA by following me on Twitter, reading this blog and visiting http://www.ima.org.uk/student/. Join the Facebook page.