Conference Report

The IMA undergraduate mathematics conference Tomorrow’s Mathematicians Today (TMT) went online

in 2021. It was hosted by the University of Greenwich and the IMA.

The first TMT, organised by Noel-Ann Bradshaw, was held at Greenwich in February 2010, and the conference has travelled around the country since then with regular returns to Greenwich. The 2021 conference was held over two days, Saturday 6 March and Sunday 7 March. The organisers were Tony Mann and Neil Saunders (Greenwich) and Cerys Thompson and Erica Tyson (IMA).

The conference gives students an opportunity to present, to their fellow undergraduates, on any mathematical topic which interests them – this might be their own project work, or sharing their excitement

about some mathematics they have come across during their studies. As with previous TMT conferences, TMT 2021 was open to undergraduates studying mathematics at any UK university, and it attracted well over 100 registrations from over 30 universities, with 18 student speakers.

After a welcome from IMA President Dr Nira Chamberlain, the conference began with a talk by Greenwich undergraduate Yousra Idichchou on The Need for Generality. The first day continued with presentations by Finley Wilde (Bristol), Kaiynat Mirza (Keele), Yanqi Cheng (UCL), Rebekah Aspinwall (Surrey), Muhiyud-Dean Mirza (Warwick), Salma El-Serafy (Nottingham), Sheeru Shamsi (Keele) and Oscar Holroyd (Warwick). Their talks covered a variety of areas in applied mathematics, medical mathematical modelling, machine learning and cryptography. The final presentation on the Saturday was the first

keynote, by Professor Colva Roney-Dougal (St Andrews), who told us about Random Games with Finite Groups.

The second day continued the variety of topics, from infinity, category theory and combinatorics, to artificial intelligence, game theory, Maxwell’s equations and cosmology. The speakers were Merlin Michalski (Warwick), Calum Hughes (Sheffield), Yago Moreno Alonso (Bristol), Ruth Ejigayehu (Greenwich,

Benjamin Andrews (Sheffield), René Mau (Open), Cam Heather (Sheffield), Mahirul Islam (Newcastle) and Oskar Szarowicz (Warwick) who concluded the student part of the conference with an interactive talk about Bayes’ theorem in machine learning. Sunday closed with a topical presentation by Dr Kit Yates (Bath) about mathematical modelling of epidemics. Full details and abstracts can be found at the conference website sites.google.com/view/imatmt2021.

Both days included an online networking session which brought together the speakers and audience and led to lots of discussion, particularly around postgraduate research, an option many of those present are considering.

It was generally agreed that the quality of student talks was outstanding. Nira Chamberlain’s opening comment, that the title of the conference was misleading because those attending already qualify for the title of ‘Mathematician’ was fully borne out by the quality of mathematics presented. The diversity of topics

and the excellence and enthusiasm of the presentations made the conference a huge success, providing

much mathematical food for thought over what was an exhaustingly concentrated but exhilarating weekend.

As at previous TMT conferences,GCHQ generously provided a prize for the best speaker. The panel had an extremely difficult choice. The winner was Yanqi Cheng for her talk on Mathematical Modelling of the Vertebrate Neural Tube – a worthy winner, especially as she coped seamlessly with a technical problem during her talk. Honourable mentions were awarded to Oscar Holroyd, and Yousra Idichchou (whose presentation was also the one most chosen as conference highlight in the delegate poll).

Feedback from delegates was universally positive, as is shown in the wordcloud. Comments included:

• There was a fantastic range of talks and a wide variety of speakers.

• Hearing my peers talk about research they have been working on inspires me to do research of my own!

• Very useful to see how Maths can be applied to real world e.g with computer science and to help improve technology.

The one big regret, frequently expressed (and shared by the organisers), was that it was a pity that the whole conference was virtual, and people could not meet physically at Greenwich’s wonderful campus. Nevertheless, as one delegate said, "Even though it’s all online it was well run and a really great conference."

This was another in the great series of IMA TMT conferences. Thanks are due to everyone who took part, especially the student speakers and the two inspirational keynote speakers. Particular thanks are due to Cerys Thompson, who managed all the technical work over the weekend, which made everything

possible.

Tony Mann FIMA

University of Greenwich