• Question: What are the types of things you talk about to do with maths?

    Asked by Vanya on 7 Jan 2020. This question was also asked by evan.smalldon, Ploom, ashleigh.
    • Photo: Sophie Carr

      Sophie Carr answered on 7 Jan 2020:

      I’m lucky enough to be part of the Ri Masterclasses in maths where I talk about a few statistics topics including Bayes Theorem, Simpson’s Paradox and using statistics to work out where fish come from. Outside of this in industry I talk about how companies can help to make sure they calculate numbers that are helpful, robust and presented in a way people can understand.

    • Photo: Fiona Macfarlane

      Fiona Macfarlane answered on 8 Jan 2020:

      When I give talks they are usually on how to use maths to create simulations of cancer. We can then try and predict which types of treatment would be best.

    • Photo: Maja Popovic

      Maja Popovic answered on 8 Jan 2020:

      When I talk about my work, it’s usually about probabilities or percentages.

      Sometimes I like to explain some funny mathematical stuff to my kids (age 9 and 7), such as that it is mathematically possible to never finish a bottle of juice if you drink a half of the remaining juice each time.

      I also enjoy telling mathematical jokes, but I have to be careful to whom I do that, not everybody will laugh!

    • Photo: Samantha Durbin

      Samantha Durbin answered on 8 Jan 2020:

      I look after a programme where people get to talk about their favourite bits of maths (like Sophie Carr mentions) and the variety of topics is huge – there’s a Masterclass on pretty much anything vaguely mathematical, including really applied topics and areas such as art and design. For example, we’ve got a few different people doing new sessions on islamic art – the maths in how to form the different patterns and the different symmetries is really interesting!

      I have my own secondary level Masterclass workshops on:
      – Mathematical modelling, which is where we use maths to try and understand and predict the world around us. In the workshop we look at how a forest fire might spread (using a grid to represent the trees and dice to help us deiced where the fire goes); the students adapt their models to include their own ideas and make things more realistic. This is a really specific example but the ideas can be used in all types of mathematical models.
      – Fractals, which are really beautiful mathematical objects – they look quite complicated but are created by actually quite simple rules. In the workshop we look at creating some fractal patterns and then look at some of their weird and wonderful properties (including that their dimension – e.g. 2D, 3D etc) isn’t a whole number.
      – Networks, or more accurately, an area of maths called graph theory. We look at some problems around how you travel around a network and how you prove whether it’s possible (you might have heard for the Bridges of Konigsberg problem). We look at some real-world problems and how a really simple idea links to one of the biggest unsolved problems in maths and computer science today.
      – Game theory, which is all about the maths of strategy. We play some different simple games and work out how to make the best moves, as well as look some more famous examples of game theory. You will have seen the “prisoner’s dilemma” game in the first CHRISTMAS LECTURE, where the volunteers had to decide if they would be naughty or nice.

      I also do Primary Masterclasses, usually on fractals (similar to the above) or ciphers and codebreaking – where we look at different ways of encrypting a message using simple ciphers (where the individual letters are changed) and how to crack these codes.

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