This is a guest post by Martin Whitworth.
I am the organiser of Cheltenham MathsJam, and I am a fan of our local Cheltenham Festivals. In addition to successful Jazz, Music and Literature Festivals, they have an annual Science Festival with high profile presenters, this year from 3-8 June. The Science Festival always includes some maths content, and that’s particularly strong this year.
A few months ago a group of us launched a membership club, The Finite Group, which you can join!
A big update is the lineup — your membership now supports the work of and gives you access to content from mathematician and TikTok star Ayliean MacDonald, as well as Chalkdust’s Matthew Scroggs and The Aperiodical’s Katie Steckles and me. Membership gives you access to a chat community and monthly livestreams. For a taste of the livestreams, check out this π minute video!
The big news is that the next livestream will be free to view live online on 27th March from 5-6pm GMT. All four of us will be working through the recent ‘100 Mathematical Conventions Questions’ quiz that’s been dividing (a small subset of) the internet. The stream will be available live, and a recording will be available to members afterwards.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a place where maths people could hang out and create cool maths things?” This idea was put to me a couple of years ago, and has stuck with me. It does sound nice.
Fast forward to 2023, and social media is collapsing. Some people have chosen a direction and are marching off towards Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, or a number of other platforms. Some people are trying to keep up with multiple of these, but feeling spread too thin and wondering if it’s worth the effort (ask me how I know!). But many people are taking the opportunity to step back and think again. People are rethinking whether they want to conduct their online social lives in public. There is a surge in private communities, things like WhatsApp groups, Slack channels and Discord rooms. These have the advantage that you aren’t part of the ‘engagement’-driven content push, but they have disadvantages too – you have to know the right people to get into the group.
Meanwhile, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a place where maths people could hang out and create cool maths things?
So we’re creating it. We’re calling it The Finite Group (who doesn’t love a punny maths name?). “We” is Katie Steckles, Sophie Maclean, Matthew Scroggs and me. It’s going to be a maths community that gets together to share and create cool maths things, that supports creators to do their work within the group and on the wider internet.
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.
If you find yourself at a loose end this month, want a break from focusing on work, or have younger mathematicians to entertain, here are some suggestions for online activities you can do/watch/attend. If you have any suggestions of your own, add them in the comments!
The IMA turns 50 this year, and is holding two celebration events and publishing a book.
Anyone who’s a fan of data and bigness will be pleased to hear that 22-28 April is going to be Big Data Week. This ‘global festival of data’ will take place in participating cities all over the world, including London, Sydney, Barcelona, Shanghai, Amsterdam, Chicago and Utrecht (we only have a MathsJam in one of those so far, but we’re working on it).
The aim of the week is to allow data scientists to work with businesses from different sectors to take advantage of the bigness of data these days – vast amounts of information collected using new technology, whose potential for future applications is mindblowing. One day we could even assemble a list of every sandwich anyone’s ever eaten. Planned events in Big Data Week will include meetups, networking events, hackathons, debates, discussions and data visualisation demos – and hopefully we’ll come out of it with more infographics than you’ve ever seen.
More information:
A date for the diary: Big Data Week at the Royal Statistical Society Website