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Year 12 Maths in Action
Miss Zubair sent this report:
Last Thursday we had a trip to London to attend lectures on maths at the Emmanuel Centre. The speakers - Ben Sparks, who was also a magician, juggler Colin Wright, Matthew Scroggs, Sara Jabbari, and Sophie Maclean – were fascinating to listen to and they discussed a broad range of topics.
Firstly, Colin Wright did ‘Nim, Officers and Other Games’, where we learnt about different types of games, how they can be simplified and described by maths, and (debatably most importantly) how to always win or draw any 2-player, finite, non chance-based game. Next was Matthew Scroggs with ‘Over-analysing video Games’. This was initially about finding the quickest route to finish a Pac-Man level and led onto discussing the shapes of a variety of dimensions certain video games would have to take part on in reality to be physically possible (without teleporting).
Then, Sara Jabbari introduced ‘Fighting Disease with Mathematics’, covering how maths is used in the medical field to track and predict populations (of both humans, and other organisms, such as antibiotic-resistant bacteria), and as such help develop new drugs and solve other-such problems.
Nicole Cozens spoke about stocks, statistics, probability and finance in ‘How to get rich quick’, which covered areas useful regardless of what career-path someone may wish to go down – everyone needs money. Also, the idea of having to work the unpredictable – an adjective essentially encapsulating the prices of stocks – is relevant to almost every part of our lives, given that we can’t predict the future.
Finally, aforementioned magician (and the chair/speaker throughout the event) Ben Sparks spoke about ‘Magical Maths’ – first doing a hilarious demonstration with someone in the audience, convincing them they were psychic with one magic trick, then demonstrating another which he went on to teach us and explain the maths behind it.
This trip thankfully didn’t have any train-troubles, so in combination with the fun of all the lectures, the day was very enjoyable and I would happily do it again.
