I wrote a mathematics-themed competition for British Science Week, which is a UK-wide event lasting ten days taking place this month.
The competition calls for individuals or groups to research the life and/or work of a mathematician and produce a poster to share their findings. The six mathematicians available to choose from are:
Two competitions have been announced by the British Society for the History of Mathematics.
The schools competition invites participants to “make a case for the most important/your favourite mathematician in the history of mathematics” by either writing an article or producing a video or multi-media project.
This competition is your chance to explore how mathematics has developed and achieved its status and who were the most important mathematicians in history who contributed to it. This year we would like you to concentrate on choosing one mathematician who has, in your opinion, been the most important person, your favourite, and to make the case for it – to explain his/her mathematics and to show their importance or what you think was special about it and them.
This is run with Plus Magazine and there are two categories for ages 11-15 and 16-19. The deadline for entries is 1st September 2019. Guidance, rules, etc. via BSHM Schools Plus Competition.
The Undergraduate Essay Competition invites essays on any topic in history of mathematics of no more than 2500 words in length and is open to people enrolled as undergraduates in UK and Irish universities in academic year 2018/19. The deadline is 21st June 2019. Guidance, rules, etc. via BSHM Undergraduate Essay Prize.
As part of this year’s MathsJam gathering, as for the last few years, we held a competition competition (you may have seen Peter’s recent post about his entry to the same event in 2014). My competition was the winner, and I thought I’d share with you some of the entries, as I very much enjoyed reading them all.
The University of Manchester’s annual Alan Turing Cryptography Competition and MathsBombe Competition are now open for registration. Now in its seventh year, the Alan Turing Cryptography Competition is for year 11 and below in England and Wales, S4 in Scotland and Year 12 in N. Ireland. There’s also a competition for older students – MathsBombe is open to year 13 and below in England and Wales, S6 in Scotland and Year 14 in N. Ireland.
Every one to two weeks a new chapter of the six-chapter story is released, and each chapter has a new cryptographic puzzle to solve. Teams consisting of up to four people can win prizes for being the first to solve each puzzle, and also for being randomly picked from all correct entries for each puzzle.
The Alan Turing Cryptography Competition begins on Monday 15th January 2018, with MathsBombe starting on Wednesday 10th January 2018. For more information and to enter, visit the Cryptography Competition website or MathsBombe website.
John Conway, here pictured browsing the character table of $Fi_{23}$
Restaurant chain Pizza Hut in the US have announced a promotion for “Pi Day” on March 14, involving an unlikely partnership with renowned group-theorist, Life-wrangler and apparent pizza-lover John Conway. (Apparently, pizza and pie are somehow linked in America. It is probably best not to worry about this.)
Featuring on their blog as the inaugural post under the optimistic tags ‘math‘ and ‘John Conway‘, they explain that three maths puzzles set by Conway will be posted on Pi Day, “varying in level of difficulty from high school to Ph.D. level”. Residents of the 48 contiguous US states can leave their answers in the comments when the puzzles are posted, and the winners receive a 3.14-year supply of pizza (or, as the rules clarify, a somewhat more prosaic $1600 Pizza Hut gift card).
Obviously we will have to wait for the questions to be unveiled to be able to judge the appropriate level of excitement for this promotion, but with Conway involved, no maths-is-really-hard nonsense in the blog post, and not a formula for the perfect anything in sight, things are looking promising for a nice bit of harmless maths/poor childhood diet fun.
Pizza Hut partners with mathematician John H. Conway for National Pi Day math contest – the blog post announcing the competition
John Conway on Wikipedia
The American Mathematical Society have created a system of online listings for people offering awards, fellowships, professional opportunities and other maths-related callouts. There’s a website at ams.org/
The system is aimed at mathematics faculty/scientists, institutions, programs, postdocs/early-career mathematicians, postgrads, undergrads, high school students and teachers (so, pretty much anyone involved in maths), and we’ve cheekily used it to post a call for submissions of articles for our Irregulars column, where we feature guest posts from other authors.
Awards, Fellowships and other opportunities, at the AMS website.
The organisation behind the Breakthrough Prize has announced a competition aimed at school-age kids, called the Breakthrough Junior Challenge, which encourages them to get excited about maths and science, and to make a 10-minute video explaining a challenging concept – which can be an existing bit of research, or something they’ve done themselves.