At the end of the Easter conference season I spent two days in London for conferences.

The first was the IMA’s flagship general mathematical interest conference, Mathematics 2009. At this I was very excited to hear Sir Roger Penrose speak. Read an outline of Sir Roger’s work at Plus. I was also pleased for the second time to hear David Spiegelhalter speak on public understanding of uncertainty (I also attended his keynote at Young Researchers in Mathematics 2009). I also heard the following speakers at the conference: Ben Heydecker on transport modelling, John McWhirter on his research, Makhan Singh and Zia Rahman on the more maths grads project‘s use of video, Helen Byrne on mathematical biology and Fred Piper on cryptography.

The second was the Women in Mathematics Day 2009. This event is designed for women who are active in mathematics to get together, including plenty of talks and posters by PhD students.

On my way home to Nottingham I stopped by the University of Leicester for an IMA East Midlands Branch talk on The Physics of Finance by Iain Clark.