Here’s a round-up of some stories from what’s now terrifyingly last year.

Statistics of the Year Results Announced

The results of the Royal Statistical Society’s Statistic of the Year competition, which we covered here when they announced a call for entries, have been announced. The winners include a UK Statistic of the Year (on the density of building in the UK – it’s lower than you think), an International Statistic of the Year (comparing the risk of a US citizen being killed by a terrorist or a lawnmower -guess which one is 34.5 times more dangerous), and five ‘highly commended’ entries.

This meant that stats from various different topics could be recognised, ranging from environmental issues, housing and teen pregnancy, to technological advances and the fundamentals of scientific research. Happily, the story was picked up by a couple of the papers, hopefully raising awareness of some of this (actually quite interesting and important) actual maths.

The full list of results, on the RSS website
Best statistics of 2017 are 69 and 0.1, at The Financial Times

LMS Mary Cartwright Lecture

The next London Mathematical Society Mary Cartwright Lecture, presented by Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb (University of Cambridge), will be held on Friday 2 March 2018 at De Morgan House in London. The lecture will be followed by a wine reception and dinner.

Organised annually by the LMS’s Women in Mathematics committee, the lecture is named for the British mathematician and chaos theorist. The event features two speakers – a warm-up from Andrea Bertozzi (UCLA) on Geometric graph-based methods for high dimensional data, followed by the Mary Cartrwight Lecture itself, given by Carola Bibiane-Schönlieb (University of Cambridge) on Model-based learning in imaging.

More information and how to register

Relatively Prime Podcast featuring… us!

We (Katie, Peter and Christian, and briefly Paul) were guests on one episode of Samuel Hansen’s Relatively Prime podcast just before Christmas – on one of our favourite hobby-horses, ridiculous made-up formulae in the press. We explained how the UK press does it better than anyone to Samuel’s US-based audience, then went on to tear a few of them apart. If you won’t be made sad by being reminded how it’s not Christmas any more, you can listen to the podcast through the RelPrime Website or on iTunes.

Formulaic Perfection, on RelPrime.com