Maths in Action 2023 Rory Davidson St Johns Leatherhead

Rory Davidson St Johns Leatherhead

On 9th March 2023 maths was most definitely brought into action, schools from around the country flocked to the Emmanuel centre in London where a thought-provoking but enjoyable day of mathematical masterclasses were held.

The first speaker, Dr Colin Wright, brought the centre’s attention onto certain numeracy games such as NIM and officers. Students were then exposed to how these games can be won easily with pre-thinking and using mathematical concepts such as binary and how you can manipulate the game into a simple array table, and also how so many games like these are all linked in the background by the same concepts and mathematics. Cementing his performance in the minds of the audience, Dr Wright brought out 3 juggling balls, to which he left the audience in awe when he performed an outstanding and complex juggling rendition at the end of his seminar, juggling the balls in ways which the audience had never seen.

Next, Dr Sara Jabbari came on stage, proving how vital mathematics is in other fields and just how applied it is to everyday activities up to the most tragic crises. Using differential equations, Dr Jabbari showed how we can use maths to model the dynamics of bacterial infections by using the differential equations to track how and why the infections grow and spread, allowing us to adapt and stop serious bacterial outbreaks. Students were inspired in this seminar by being presented with the breadth of mathematics and the extreme overlap that it has with about everything else in life and in the clever ways we can apply, what we see as more as pure mathematics, in the world around us to greatly benefit our lives.

Another seminar on the over analysation of games was next, with Matthew Scroggs putting a stress on one of the most famous video games in the world- Pac Man. Posing the question of, in 3D, what are the actual maps of the games? Shocking the crowd, as in 3D Pac man it is actually played on a cylinder, meanwhile the game-asteroids, which looks like on a screen it is played on a flat rectangle, in 3D it is actually played on a torus (doughnut shape), which was to the surprise of the students who all believed it was being played on a sphere, until gameplay, played by a student, was shown, showing how distorted and wrong the assumption was. Students loved this seminar through its projection of maths through video games, and the seminars interactive nature.

Sophie Maclean, the host, took over next, delivering a seminar on using maths to obtain what everyone wants the most- money. The economics driven seminar educated the students on trading and the ways of analysing both real world issues and the maths behind it, however a small exercise at the end on when to sell a stock proved how unpredictable stock prices were to the students!

Finally, Dr Tom Crawford stepped up onto stage, boasting many degrees, a YouTube channel with over 100,000 subscribers and impressive tattoos, the talk about the 7 million-dollar problems was not one to miss. The mere prospect of 1 million dollars just to solve a maths problem enticed every viewer in the venue. Alas, as the seminar went on, it became clear why these were million-dollar problems. Since they were announced in 2000- only one of the seven problems have been solved. The Poincare conjecture, involving an area of maths called topology, was solved by Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman. This problem took almost a century for it to be solved, first proposed in 1904 and then eventually solved in 2002. Following on Dr Crawford spoke about the Navier-Stokes equation, a problem he holds so dearly to himself that he has it tattooed along his torso!

In all, the day was a huge success and represented mathematics well as a field being applied to every aspect of life, from video games to stopping bacterial infection outbreaks. But also represented maths as incomplete, inspiring the next generation to explore and to try fill in the missing gaps.