This is a guest post by Martin Whitworth.

I am the organiser of Cheltenham MathsJam, and I am a fan of our local Cheltenham Festivals. In addition to successful Jazz, Music and Literature Festivals, they have an annual Science Festival with high profile presenters, this year from 3-8 June. The Science Festival always includes some maths content, and that’s particularly strong this year.

Tickets are already on sale, and I think are still available for many events. I hope many of the presentations will be of interest, but my focus here is to highlight some of those with a mathematical theme.

Matt Parker will be presenting Getting Triggy With It: Matt Parker Does the Maths which is an abridged version of his new show, based on his latest book. He’ll also be at the Variety Night.

If you like puzzles, I notice two events on that theme. Katie Steckles and Ben Sparks will be hosting Puzzles and Pints (sold out). This has become a regular event. If you enjoy it, why not also come along to your local MathsJam – available in many locations – to do similar activities on a monthly basis?

Katie is a former winner of the famous Cheltenham Overambitious Demo Challenge (I was there for her winning performance including “paper Katie” – a life sized paper cut-out of herself, made with only a single cut!). She will also be a contestant at Master of Tasks. Co-presenter Ben may be known to you as a regular on the YouTube Numberphile Channel.

Also on the puzzle theme, join Robin Ince, Alex Bellos and The Times puzzle editor Mick Hodgkin for Puzzlemaster. Robin is a comedian, science enthusiast and a stalwart at the Cheltenham festivals. In addition to authoring several puzzle books, Alex presents the weekly Alex Bellos Monday puzzle in the Guardian newspaper, which I recommend. It has often featured at our MathsJam meetings.

Prof. Kit Yates will be presenting on How to expect the unexpected, based on his book of the same name. He is a professor at the University of Bath and came to my attention particularly for his exemplary work educating the public on mathematical modelling of Covid 19. Prof. David Spiegelhalter OBE is Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge, and BBC Wipeout contestant. I recommend his book The Art of statistics – Learning from Data. He will be presenting on The Art of Uncertainty based on his new book of the same name.

My interest in mathematics is recreational.  Professionally, I’m a physicist working in food science and have also booked for talks on those themes. Allow me to mention my former colleague and science communicator Chris Clarke, who is presenting for families at Sweet Shop Science and for adults on The Science of Beer – and I’ll also mention my friend Prof. Andrea Sella, a regular at the festival who will once more be giving several presentations on themes such as food science, chemistry and sustainability.

Cheltenham Festivals are a charity. These are some of their projects: Our Projects. In addition to organising festival events, they do amazing outreach with young people in Gloucestershire. They host lots of school groups at the festivals and do outreach in local schools. I don’t recall the figure, but thousands of school children visit the Science Festival every year – see Science For Schools.

One of their science festival projects is FameLab:

“… the largest science communication competition and training programme in the world. It discovers, trains and promotes the best new voices in science – including social sciences – technology and engineering. FameLab is broken down into three different competitions. FameLab UK, FameLab International and the schools initiative FameLab Academy UK.“

This year, the festival hosts the FameLab UK Final. It’s always a highlight for me and I will be there, cheering on our early career science communicators.  Sometimes there’s also a livestream!