Inspiring Future Mathematicians

This week, the Maths Department took a delegation of Fifth Form and Lower Sixth Mathematicians to the Crescent Theatre in Birmingham to see the Maths Inspiration lectures, a selection of talks designed to show that there is a lot more to Maths than just taking exams.

The show was introduced by Dr Yolanda Ohene, a neuro-imaging scientist.  She researches imaging techniques that can be used to understand how the brain works.  Fourier transforms are the mathematical method used to separate the multiple waves received by an MRI machine.  It was amazing to see the detailed images that can be obtained.

The next speaker was Rob Eastaway, author of Maths books and puzzle advisor for New Scientist magazine, who explained the results of his tests of ChatGPT.  Despite it being able to answer most exam questions, he found a number of puzzles which baffled the Artificial Intelligence system.  It can write a story for you, but it struggled to find creative approaches to problem solving.  His conclusion was that it is going to be down to us to keep working on puzzles and problems, so we can solve them ourselves!

Next up was Sammie Buzzard, who is a glaciologist and climate scientist and whose Maths research led her to the Arctic, having to learn how to use a rifle to keep herself safe in the process.  She works on modelling the water pockets appearing on ice shelves to predict future changes, and she explained the impacts of losing these ice shelves and how difficult it is to model when data about the Arctic has only been gathered in relatively recent years and when climate change is impacted by emission levels, which depend on human behaviours.

Ben Sparks rounded off the show by talking about links between Maths and Music.  This talk gave Sam Caskie an opportunity to show off his knowledge of 1960s music, and Will Kendrick impressed everyone by spotting that an equation was impossible to solve.  We learnt how the notes that we are familiar with arose in part because 3 to the power of 12 is relatively close to 2 to the power of 19!  We also learned about the surprisingly simple maths behind noise-cancelling headphones.  This explains how karaoke tracks are made, which he demonstrated by removing the lyrics from a track using simple, freely available software.

Overall, it was a most entertaining and enlightening afternoon.