At the end of April I made a trip to Newcastle and back via Sheffield to give my talk on Spin in Ball Games and play on the Wii. Both of these events were fun and I think provided some welcome revision relief for the students. At this time of year a lot of universities…
Conferences on Mathematics in London
At the end of the Easter conference season I spent two days in London for conferences. The first was the IMA’s flagship general mathematical interest conference, Mathematics 2009. At this I was very excited to hear Sir Roger Penrose speak. Read an outline of Sir Roger’s work at Plus. I was also pleased for the…
Young Researchers in Mathematics 2009
Back in conference season, I attended the Young Researchers in Mathematics conference at Cambridge (AKA Beyond Part III). This was my first time in Cambridge and it was good to see the maths building, of which I have heard a lot during my travels. Unfortunately, when I got there it appeared someone had parked a…
Podcast: Episode 28 – Maths news with Sarah Shepherd
These are the show notes for episode 28 of the Travels in a Mathematical World Podcast. 28 is the number of dominoes in a standard dominoes set. More about 28 from NumberADay. This week on the podcast I met Sarah Shepherd, PhD student at the University of Nottingham and Editor of iSquared Magazine and we…
What’s pi got to do with it?
Last week at Meet the Mathematicians I saw a talk by Jon Keating , “Some thoughts on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” (an essay by Wigner). One element that I have taken away from this was when Jon was talking about the unexpected connections between mathematical concepts, illustrated using the normal distribution (an example from…
Podcast: Episode 27 – Oliver Jensen, British Applied Mathematics Colloquium 2009
These are the show notes for episode 27 of the Travels in a Mathematical World podcast. 27 is the first composite number not divisible by any of its digits. More about 27 from Number Gossip. In April was the British Applied Mathematics Colloquium (BAMC) 2009, the premier annual national meeting of applied mathematics in the…
Meet the Mathematicians video
A couple of weeks ago I attended Meet the Mathematicians, a schools outreach day at the School of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Nottingham connected to the BAMC conference. A short video has just been released which was taken during the Meet the Mathematicians day which is worth a watch.