I’ve put together a series of online public maths presentations, to take place in the last couple of weeks of term before Christmas.
This came about after a few people on the Talking Maths in Public WhatsApp group complained that we can hardly ever take up requests for a speaker to deliver a fun maths talk due to our disabilities, usually because of the difficulty of travelling to and from an event. I quipped that we should set up a series of talks for non-commutative mathematicians, and then I was told that the department’s EDI committee had a load of money sitting unused in its budget. So I decided to use some of it!
In the UK, schools have now broken up for the summer, or are about to, meaning parents face a long six-to-eight weeks of trying to find interesting things for the kids to do. If you or someone you know is in this situation, and the kid(s) in question would like to do some mathematics, we’ve got you covered.
Online resources for primary (ages 5-11)
Always a good shout for mathematical things to do, the wonderful NRICH, who are based at the University of Cambridge, are posting interactive mathematical challenges every weekday from now until 2nd September.
Family maths charity Maths on Toast are posting weekly STEAM activities including craft, construction, puzzles, baking and games, under the banner of Summer Fun with Little Robot. They’re also running a ‘Join-in Project’ themed around Truchet tilings, called Infinity Tiles – participants can send in their own ideas to be featured in an online gallery.
While there aren’t specific summer-themed activities, there are plenty of great resources and thoughts about ways to engage with young mathematicians on the Talking Math With Your Kids website.
The good old BBC Bitesize website has a selection of good interactive games, including several maths-themed ones (now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be playing Karate Cats).
While they don’t have anything specific for the summer, we can always recommend Mathgon’s online courses and activities, including the incredibly versatile PolyPad, and plenty of puzzles and games.
Just some of the things you can play with in PolyPad
If you can get to Leeds, we can highly recommend the wonderful maths discovery centre at MathsCity – with tickets at £6.50 for adults / £4.50 for children aged 3-16 / £18 family ticket, and within easy reach of Leeds train station, it’s a great day out and you can spend hours playing with the interactive exhibits and puzzles. They’ve just launched a great new codebreaking exhibit for this summer, with over 20 interactive coding activities and crafts. There’ll also be bubble-related activities on 6th August, and they’ll be represented at Leeds’ Breeze in the Park events on 17th & 18th August.
In the north-east, numeracy initiative Multiply is running three Multiply Roadshow events in Gateshead. The events will feature much-loved celebrities including Johnny Ball, Scarlett Moffatt and Coronation Street’s Ryan Thomas, alongside family games, crafts, and activities, as well as information about short fully funded maths courses from Gateshead Learning and Skills. (Sadly the Johnny Ball event is happening as we write, but the others are 8th & 15th August).
The Royal Institution in London has a large programme of summer holiday workshops running from 25 July to 26 August, which cost £35 half-day / £50 full day, with discounts available for Ri Young Members. Bursaries to support attendance are available via the Potential Trust (details on the individual session pages under ‘About Our Workshops’).
Bletchley Park remains the classic mathematical historical day out: tickets are £24.50 for adults, £16.00 for 12-17 year olds and it’s free for under-12s – plus the ticket is an annual pass, so you can visit as many times as you want in a year. Over the summer they have a Summer Fun programme including Puzzles and Pastimes on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, family guided tours on Fridays, a summer concert series and Top Secret Mission Packs available on entry for £1. They also currently have a temporary exhibition on the Art of Data.
Honourable mention for site-friend Kyle Evans who’s performing his family (7+) maths show Return of the Math(s) (left) at the Edinburgh Fringe from 6-15 August – a ‘fast-paced hour of inclusive maths-based family fun [… including] madcap demos, loads of crowd participation and mind-melting mathematics.’
To celebrate 14th March (π day), MathsCity in Leeds is hosting a competition to celebrate everyone’s favourite geometrical shape whose circumference is π times its diameter: the circle.
The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering celebrates innovation in engineering with an annual prize awarded to some of the world’s top engineers. Starting today, the QEPrize YouTube channel will be hosting a Month of Making, with a video each day supplied by a different STEM person (including some mathematicians!), encouraging you to make, instead of buy, at least one Christmas present this year.
The month has been organised by physics teacher and STEM communicator Alom Shaha (who recently featured on our Mathematical Objects podcast). Alom says:
I want other people to experience the joy I find in “making” by encouraging them to make stuff for the people in their lives. Christmas feels like the perfect time to do this and, with the help of the people behind the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, I’ve somehow managed to recruit a bunch of incredibly creative and talented people to share some ideas for things you could make. Over the course of the next month or so, from 15 November to 12 December, we’ll be publishing a series of videos with simple instructions for making a range of gifts, from simple machines to pieces of jewellery.
There’s also a competition running to win a copy of Alom’s book, Mr Shaha’s Marvellous Machines, for anyone who makes one of the suggested gifts and shares a photo or video of it with the hashtag #AMonthOfMaking.
The team that brought you the 24 Hour Maths Magic Show last October are at it again, and are planning a semi-regular evening YouTube variety show called Clopen Mic Night, with short segments from a selection of mathematical guests, including comedy, music, demonstrations, magic, puzzles and art, showcasing some top maths communicators and hopefully providing a fun night in. The event is supported by Talking Maths in Public, a network for maths communicators based in the UK, and this first show will take place alongside their 2021 conference event.
It’s called Clopen Mic Night because it’s both an open mic night (in the sense that you’ll see a variety of different people doing different things) and a closed mic night (in that the organisers curate the line-up to ensure a variety of quality acts). If you’ve not encountered the concept of a clopen set, it describes a set that is both open and closed. Usually things are clopen for tedious technical reasons – the empty set and the whole set are both trivially clopen, and most interesting examples crop up in awkwardly-defined sets with non-standard topologies and distance metrics.
The first event is taking place on Thursday 26th August, from 8-9pm, on my YouTube channel, and you can watch along for free, join in with the chat, and drop a coin in our virtual tip bucket if you like what you see. This will hopefully be the first of many such shows (assuming it all goes well!) and for future shows we’ll be looking for acts to join us – anyone participating will also be able to get advice and feedback on their bit in various ways, and we’re hoping it’ll be a chance for people to try out fun new material and showcase the best maths communication has to offer.
For more information about the show, including the lineup for this first event, you can visit the Clopen Mic Night website and sign up for a reminder before each show so you don’t miss it. For updates on future events and how to apply to perform (once that becomes a thing), check the @ClopenMic twitter account.
Cheltenham Science Festival starts this week, running from 10– 13 June. This year, the event has a hybrid format, with a combination of socially-distanced talks, live and online workshops, and free live streaming of many of the events. Tickets remain available for many of the events and workshops. Check the website or download the brand new Cheltenham Festivals app for details.
Today the European Mathematical Society launches PopMath, a calendar of popular maths events taking place across Europe and beyond, including online. It should be a great resource for people wanting to find or share details of mathematical outreach activities.
