On Thursday 21st March, a group of Year 11 and Sixth Form Mathematics students, attended the Maths Inspiration lectures at the Hexagon Theatre in Reading.
The event was hosted by stand-up mathematician Matt Parker and the presenters were well-known experts in their field.
The lectures were interesting, interactive and highly entertaining. They included a wide variety of topics to think about, ranging from quick starter maths questions to revealing every-day examples. Bestselling maths author Rob Eastaway, through his favourite maths puzzles, revealed how intuition can lead us to the wrong solutions. Crowd analyst, Aoife Hunt, explained the connection between movements of crowds and quadratic equations and how computing is used to predict what will be done in an emergency. Speaker and maths populariser, James Grimes, revealed the importance of numbers when using the internet and also the secrets of coding through examples from history, even showing an original WWII Enigma machine to the audience.
The talks not only had excellent mathematical content very relevant to the maths taught to this age group, but also widened the horizons of pupils and indicated that maths can help in future jobs. Year 11 student Annie commented, “I really enjoyed seeing how there is a creative side of maths and all the job opportunities there are in maths” and Lower Sixth student Lisa said, “This show has demonstrated how topics in the curriculum are used in real life application, it is actually much better than I expected, some very cool stuff!”
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