Maths Scholars from Year 11, Lower and Upper Sixth ventured to The Hexagon on Tuesday 7th March for an insight into how Maths works outside the classroom. Their journey of discovery took them to The Hexagon in Reading where the Maths Inspiration lectures provided an entertaining series of talks from some renown mathematicians.
The host, Matt Parker, introduced three talks ‘A Slippery Situation’ by Sammie Buzzard, ‘Maths in a Spin’ by Hugh Hunt and finally ‘The Sacred Geometry of Chance’ by Ben Sparks. Sammie, a glaciologist and climate scientist, explainedhow you can use maths to learn more about our planet and demonstrates how modelling can unlock secrets hidden in the ice in Antarctica. Hugh, an engineer and television presenter specialising in climate change demonstrated the maths of spinning objects and Ben talked about the beauty and magic of numbers, discussed probability and played his guitar!
“My favourite part of the lecture was Ben Sparks teaching us not to gamble without the full details by suggesting there are two people with same birthday in a group of 70 people and someone actually fell for it.” commented Isaac (Lower Sixth) ‘after that he showed us the probability of him winning, which he is almost definitely going to win.”
The trip followed the award of the Maths Olympiad certificates given out to gifted mathematicians in Years 10 and 11 the previous week. The group had tackled the UK Maths Trust challenge, a national competition encouraging problem solving through mathematical competence in a wide variety of techniques.
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