The second episode of the Math/Maths Podcast is available at Pulse-Project. Samuel Hansen & I talk over maths news and my experience at the How to talk Maths in Public conference. I hope you enjoy it!
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Mathematics Today June 2010: University Liaison Officer’s Report
Where do I go from here?
As we come to the end of the academic year I find myself reflecting on my travels over the year, particularly as these relate to my plans for next year. There follows a list of universities I have visited this year, either to give a lecture or stand at a maths careers fair. My best information suggests this represents two thirds of UK universities with a mathematics degree programme. If you are a staff member or student at a university that is not mentioned on this list, please consider contacting me to see if we can work together.
I keep meeting staff at universities who are surprised that I am able to take the time to come and speak to their students. To be clear: my intention is that I offer to speak at any university with mathematics students in the country. My time is allocated for these lectures on a first come first served basis, with an attempt to arrange visits to several nearby universities in one trip for the sake of efficiency. It may be that I am in contact with someone at your university and we haven’t been able to find a mutually convenient time for a visit, or perhaps I simply don’t know anyone at your university. Some visits are arranged through the mathematics department, while others are directly with a student group or through the careers service. If a visit has been arranged, this may have been arranged by a student who is no longer around so it is still worth contacting me. Even if a visit is not possible to every university I would like to have some level of IMA involvement in every mathematics department in the country. As well as lectures we have leaflets we can distribute and a range of opportunities, including a grants programme, for student groups.
In the 2009/10 academic year I have given 49 IMA lectures and operated 5 IMA stalls at careers fairs, and in doing so I have spoken to over 1900 students and 120 staff at 46 universities this year. 34 of the lectures were my ‘Careers for mathematicians’; the remaining 15 were on mathematical topics. I currently offer lectures on ‘Puzzles’, ‘Cryptography’, ‘Chance & coincidence’ and ‘Spin in ball games’. We call these ‘Clement W. Jones Lectures’ in honour of Professor Clement W. Jones CMath FIMA, whose bequest of £20,000 helped fund the University Liaison initiative.
This academic year I have visited the following universities: Aberdeen, Aberystwyth, Bath, Bolton, Brighton, Bristol, Brunel, Cardiff, Derby, Dundee, Durham, Edinburgh, Exeter, Glasgow, Greenwich, Heriot-Watt, Imperial College, Keele, Kent, Kingston, Lancaster, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores, London Met, LSE, Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan, Newcastle, Northumbria, Nottingham, Nottingham Trent, Oxford, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Sheffield, Southampton, St. Andrews, Stirling, Strathclyde, Surrey, Swansea, UEA, UWE and York. A further six universities which I did not visit this year were represented by undergraduates at the Tomorrow’s Mathematicians Today conference at Greenwich: Birkbeck, Cambridge, QMUL, Royal Holloway, UCL and Warwick.
If you are interested in arranging a lecture, particularly if your university is not on this list, please email me on peter.rowlett@ima.org.uk or say hello on Twitter @peterrowlett.
Activities March-April 2010
March was an active period of visits to universities. I visited the West of England and gave my careers talk at Bristol, UWE and Bath, where on the advice of the Head of School I took an enjoyable walk down the hill back to the town. I gave the same talk at Brunel. Some readers may remember my praise of the maths careers fair at York in the February issue of Mathematics Today and I was happy to give the opening talk at the fair this year and gave my careers talk at Leeds in the same trip. At the end of term I travelled to Aberystwyth and gave my Cryptography talk.
April was mostly taken up with the Easter vacation, with some universities returning for two or three weeks of teaching at the end of April and beginning of May. I gave my lecture on Cryptography at Derby. At Surrey I found a large audience, mostly of first year students taking an interest in their future at an unusually early point in their university career. This was particularly pleasing as most of them had finished an exam just an hour before my talk!
The Carnival is coming to town
The 66th Carnival of Mathematics has been posted at Wild About Math! I have agreed to host the 67th Carnival, so this is a call for submissions.
What is a maths blog carnival? There is a good introduction by Mike Croucher over at Walking Randomly’s What is a Maths Carnival? including:
At the most basic level, a maths carnival is just a set of links to recent blog articles about mathematics, but that’s selling the whole idea short somewhat. I’ve always liked to think that the two carnivals are the shop-front of the mathematics blogging world — a reason for us all to get together and celebrate everything that we are proud of in our little corner of the web. Other people compare a blog carnival to a magazine’s table of contents, which can direct you to a wide variety of articles. The articles are written by different people, but they are all tied together by the theme/focus/area-of-interest that defines the magazine.
So if you have a blog post or article you think might be of interest to a wider audience, please send me a note for the 67th Carnival using the Carnival of Mathematics submission form. My Carnival will be on the 2nd of July so aim to submit something by the end of June.
If you’re interested in hosting future Carnivals, you can contact Mike on Twitter via @CarnivalOfMath or various other ways listed on his blog Walking Randomly.
200 posts later, who is Peter Rowlett?
At 100 posts I paused for a summary of what has changed. This seems to be a reasonable idea, so I’m doing it again in this, the 200th post.
I am still working for the University of Nottingham‘s School of Mathematical Sciences, where my job title is Technology-Enhanced-Learning Officer. I support use of technology in teaching within the School, most of which is through various forms of e-assessment. I started a blog about this, but haven’t updated it in a while, over at Adventures in Technology Enhanced Learning.
I also still work as University Liaison Officer for the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), although I have reduced my hours. My arrangement now is to work 52 days over a year, and these are concentrated into weeks when students are around, which means at this time of the year I am doing less for them. I still produce a podcast, Travels in a Mathematical World, although this is on summer hiatus.
The saving made on working fewer hours for the IMA is to enable me to return to my PhD in e-assessment in maths at Nottingham Trent University (NTU). Since the 100th post I have completed my PGCertHE at NTU and become a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. I also upgraded my BCS membership from Associate Member to Member. I think this makes me: Peter James Rowlett BSc (Hons) MSc PGCertHE FHEA MIMA MBCS.
If you’d like to hear me speaking about my work, I was recently interviewed by Samuel Hansen for his podcast Strongly Connected Components episode 18. We enjoyed our conversation so much that it led to us starting the Math/Maths Podcast, a regular (weekly? we’ll see) conversation about mathematics between the UK and USA.
I have been videoed giving talks for a project called History of Maths and x. I started, on request, to keep a map of where I had given talks. I registered as a STEM Ambassador and have been cleared through an Enhanced CRB check. I have been co-opted to Council of the British Society for the History of Mathematics. I have been elected Senior Vice Chair of the East Midlands IMA Branch.
Math/Maths Podcast: 5136 miles of mathematics
I have begun recording a new podcast, a conversation about mathematics with Samuel Hansen, released via Pulse Project. From the Pulse Project Math/Maths Podcast webpage:
A conversation about mathematics between the UK and USA. Peter Rowlett in Nottingham calls Samuel Hansen in Las Vegas and the pair chat about math and maths that has been in the news, that they’ve noticed and that has happened to them.
Download episode 1. Visit the Pulse Project Math/Maths Podcast webpage for show notes.
Strongly Connected Components Episode 18
Strongly Connected Components is a podcast which offers interviews with mathematicians and which is a fine addition to any podcast collection. Host Samuel Hansen interviews some distinguished, interesting and entertaining mathematicians. In a break with this tradition, in episode 18 Samuel chose to interview me.
Over at acmescience.com, the episode is described as:
Your valiant host Samuel Hansen was joined by fellow mathematical podcaster Peter Rowlett for a conversation where Peter explains about what exactly the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications is, how he finds and interviews guests, and Peter also tries to interview Samuel as much as Samuel tries to interview him.
Being interviewed was an interesting experience – I haven’t been on that end of a podcast interview before. I was much less comfortable than when I am recording myself speaking to a mathematician for Travels in a Mathematical World. I suppose the lack of control and fear of saying something stupid was to blame! By the end of the recording I could hardly remember what I’d said at the start. Along the way, as the episode description says, I did ask Samuel a few questions, somehow trying to drag myself to the other side of the interview where I am more comfortable! All silly, really. It was fun speaking to Samuel and I hope the result is worth a listen.
What has happened to the podcast?
So, five months into 2010 what have we learned? I am bad at updating the blog this year as well. I’m sorry blog, Twitter is just so much easier!
Here is a post I’ve been meaning to write for a while. The Travels in a Mathematical World podcast is on hiatus and I wanted to explain this, since I didn’t get chance to in the last recording.
I intended to get to 60 episodes by Easter, then stop until the autumn, to more or less follow the university teaching periods. The podcast, you may remember, is linked to my work for the IMA, where I am involved in engagement with university students. However, there’s a complicated process for getting the podcast online and a key person was unwell for a few weeks so we only got as far as 57.
I have a few more recordings to be edited and hope to release them in the autumn semester. Ultimately the podcast is supposed to give students an idea of their career options and I think there are a good number and range of episodes to do that. I am now operating a reduced programme of activity for the IMA, having taken back some time to work on my PhD, so the opportunity for recording new episodes will be reduced. So I have a feeling the podcast might max out around 70. We’ll see.
The other podcast I have been releasing is the very occasional History of Maths and x. I have so far recorded two of these linked to articles for iSquared magazine. I have written a third article for iSquared, on probability, which will be in issue 12. This means I am due to give and record a talk. However, the students are currently doing their exams and then will be gone for the summer, so I won’t give a traditional lecture. But yesterday I played with a new tablet PC I’ve got at Nottingham as part of a project I am involved with. I need to try this out, so I might look into doing some kind of recording with this. But this won’t be anytime soon as I have a sore throat!
Issue 12 will be the final issue of iSquared, so I will not be asked to write further articles. Does this mean History of Maths and x is finished? I hope not. I feel like I’ve told part of several stories and there is a lot more to tell. But I have to prioritise the activities I do that enable me to pay the mortgage, and those I pay to do (my PhD). So I won’t officially end the History of Maths and x, but neither will I at present specifically plan new episodes.
Don’t forget, all previous episodes of Travels in a Mathematical World are still available for download, so if you haven’t listened to them then you might like to go back and get them. If you have listened to them all, you will have to wait I’m afraid. While you’re waiting, an iTunes review would be greatly appreciated ;)