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QEPrize’s Month of Making

By Katie Steckles. Posted November 15, 2021

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.

More information

QEPrize Supports ‘A Month of Making’ for more sustainable Christmas presents (press release)

Month of Making website: qeprize.org/a-month-of-making

Month of Making playlist on the QEPrize YouTube channel

Clopen Mic Night – new online maths variety show

By Katie Steckles. Posted August 13, 2021



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 2021 preview

By Martin Whitworth. Posted June 7, 2021



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.

PopMath Outreach Events Calendar launched

By Katie Steckles. Posted January 21, 2021



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.

24-hour Maths Magic Show next weekend

By Katie Steckles. Posted October 22, 2020



Next weekend, a group of maths presenters will be getting together some mathematicians, magicians and other cool people to put on a 24-hour long online YouTube mathematical magic $x$-stravaganza. Each half-hour will feature a different special guest sharing a mathematical magic trick of some kind, and across the day there’ll be a total of 48 tricks for you to watch and puzzle over.

Upcoming Mathematical Events/Competitions in October 2020

By Katie Steckles. Posted October 1, 2020

Here’s a round-up of some mathematical events and competitions that might be of interest, happening from October.

Help for those delivering university mathematics online

By Peter Rowlett. Posted May 22, 2020



In the pandemic lockdown, people have been grappling with delivering teaching, learning, assessment, support and outreach online, and facing the prospect of continuing to do so into the autumn. In response to this, here are four free online events that are coming up where people doing this for mathematics and statistics are offering practical advice.

sigma Online Support Workshop – 29 May 2020

An online webinar, from 10.00 am to 4.30 pm (BST) on Friday 29th May 2020, offering a selection of talks on using different techniques and technologies practitioners of mathematics and statistics support are using.

This is run by the sigma Network for Excellence in Mathematics and Statistics Support, a long-running supportive community association.

Teaching and Learning Mathematics Online (TALMO) – 2-3 June 2020

A workshop on the afternoon of Tuesday 2nd June and morning of Wednesday 3rd June, offering short online presentations on pedagogical and technological issues and practices associated with online delivery. A call for contributions is open now, along with a form to sign up, to be kept informed of the workshop, seminar series, and other activities.

TALMO is a community initiative supported by the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, the London Mathematical Society and the Royal Statistical Society.

Talking Maths in Lockdown (TMiL) – Maths communication in universities – 4 June 2020

TMiL is a series of online events from the people behind the Talking Maths in Public series of conferences. The session on 4th June is aimed at “people who deliver maths outreach activities as part of a university or large organisation” and promises to “discuss what people can still do, and how to still access training”. It’s part of a series of five informational sessions, and the others will be released on YouTube (the first one is there already).

E-Assessment in Mathematical Sciences (EAMS) – 22 June – 1 July 2020

EAMS is an international conference mixing practitioners and researchers in computer-based assessment which has run since 2016. The 2020 iteration of EAMS will take place online between the 22nd June – 1st July 2020, and will offer “a mix of presentations of new techniques, and pedagogic research, as well as workshops where you can get hands-on with leading e-assessment software”.