Invisibility has long been employed in works of fantasy, from “cloaking devices” on Star Trek spaceships to Harry Potter’s magic cloak. Scientists are actually making devices with these properties. To achieve the feat of cloaking an object, they have developed what are known as metamaterials. In this workshop we will talk about metamaterials and explain how mathematics can improve our understanding about them.
The way that we partition voting districts has a big impact on the voting process in democracies, and it can be difficult to say what's fair and what's not in an objective way. In this workshop, we will explore this question through mathematics with real life examples and a game.
My workshop will be about low Reynolds number fluids and the challenges that microorganisms face when they swim through fluid.
If we know a line has dimension 1 and a square has dimension 2, what does an object with dimension 1.5 look like? Or dimension 0.63092975…? Take a look into the world of fractals – complex mathematical objects whose dimension doesn’t fit into our usual definition, and which can have an infinite perimeter contained in a finite area. Surprisingly fractals are relatively simple to draw using shapes and lines we are all familiar with. We will discuss how these objects are constructed and have a go at inventing our own fractals.
The Bridges of Konigsberg problem famously asks whether it is possible to walk around the city crossing each bridge exactly once. In this workshop we will investigate this problem and see how it led to the development of Graph Theory, an area of mathematics which has widespread applications.
We will have a go at understanding one of the maths puzzles in the Ladies Diary, and look at how women in the 18th century might have solved it.
We discuss the equation describing the heat flow in a rod in a very simple way. Then, to describe its solutions, we briefly talk about the Fourier series and some connections to spectral theory.
Have you ever wondered how birds flock together, how fish swarm, and how the cells in your skin know how to close a scratch? Soft active matter uses statistical mechanics, soft matter theory and numerical simulations to understand how individually moving agents act together to form swarms, flocks and living materials.
Do you have a favourite number? What makes it special? We will look at some interesting numbers and various closed (and open!) problems containing them!
In this workshop we will overview various methods for modelling medical data, from linear regression to machine learning methods. We will discuss how we choose the right model for our data and practice with real data sets.
If you have a pile of stones, when is it possible to arrange them as both a triangle and a square? As we answer this question, we'll use tools from number theory, in particular the area of Diophantine equations.