MathsJam Gathering 2016
This is a list of talks given at the 2016 MathsJam Weekend, along with a brief description and slides where we have them. There's also a Songbook of words from the MathsJamJam which happened in 2016.
The gathering took place on 12th-13th November 2016.
Saturday
Session 1a : 14:15 - 15:02
Colin Wright - Welcome to the MathsJam, 2016
Colin Wright - Constructions with Obstructions
David Bedford - Name That Polynomial
David has devised a method to work out what polynomial you're thinking of, given only the knowledge that it's in a certain form and its value at two points.
Alison Kiddle - More than one way to skin a cat
I spend much of my time thinking about how students solve problems, and how to help them become better problem solvers. I will share a couple of problems and invite you to find at least one way to solve them. No cats will be harmed.
Michael Borcherds - Singular Value Decomposition
The story of how Singular Value Decomposition keeps popping up in problems I'm trying to solve
Donald Bell - Symmetric Oddities (and Eventies)
Last year, I presented my 3-4-5 Triangle Symmetry Puzzle, where an ODD number of identical ASYMMETRIC pieces can make a SYMMETRICAL shape. Lots of people liked it.
Martyn Parker - Bills of Mortality
Martyn's found some old lists of how and why people died, and is sharing it as an example of some amusing statistics.
Phil Harvey - The pigeonhole principle
A card trick - and a look at some puzzles that are based on this principle.
Session 1b : 15:25 - 16:12
Adam Atkinson - Everything Old is New Again, Again
Adam has discovered a story which involves some people misunderstanding how gravity works, and shares it with us as a cautionary tale.
Phil Ramsden - Factorising A Large Semiprime When The Person Who Supplied It Has Been A Bit Careless
At Imperial, I run the First Year Mathematical Computation course. Each year, there's a coursework task on RSA ciphers, which involves using my public key to send messages, and making one of your own to receive them. If you can factorise my N, you get 100%, even if you get everything else wrong. But there's a catch: if I factorise yours, you pay a 5% penalty. I'm not a cryptanalyst or a number theorist, and I don't own a supercomputer. I have no more than a few minutes to spend attacking any one student's N. But I'm sneaky, and I have a few tricks up my sleeve. Just between ourselves, I'd like to share a few of them.
Andrew Macdonald - Big O and little o, a tale of two Os
How can we classify the complexity of algorithms - declare some some (dis-similar) processes to be equivaliently expensive and others as strictly more or less costly to compute.
Derek Couzens - Wau - a constant more important than e or pi!!!
Adam Townsend - Is there a perfect maths font?
Peter Rowlett - Mathematical Toddler Toys
Peter has been trying to find mathematical toys for his small human, including a Hoberman Sphere, and a selection of good books including Julia Donaldson's Monkey Puzzle.
Noel-Ann Bradshaw - Nightingale's Nightmare
Problems faced by Florence Nightingale when she created her graphs depicting mortality rates and why this is still relevant today.
Jorge Nuno Silva - A mathematical card trick from Moscow's Olympiads
A problem with an interesting story of its own gives rise to a nice mathematical card trick.
Session 1c : 16:35- 17:22
Jonathan Histed - Boomerangs
Daniel Griller - The Puzzle Vault
Having spent the last few years searching for and attempting to solve hundreds, if not thousands, of mathematics problems, here I propose to share a few of the gems I have unearthed. These puzzles, in my opinion, represent the standard by which all other problems should be measured. Problem composition is an art form, and as such the presentation will double as a celebration of human creativity.
Kathryn Taylor - Lucky Numbers
Martin Owen - More effective strategies for experimenting
How do we explore how to make the perfect piece of toast or pour the perfect pint of beer?
Sam Headleand - Mathematics of matrimony
I've recently got engaged and have figured out planning a wedding gives you loads of excuses to do maths. I'll show you a couple of ways how.
Rogerio Martins - The (not so simple!) chain fountain
Zoe Griffiths - Baking Boundaries
Tarim - What is real?
Real numbers lead to some interesting, and somewhat counter-intuitive, ideas. An attempt to show that real numbers may have less to do with reality than you thought.
Session 1d : 17:45 - 18:32
Matthew Scroggs - MENACE
In 1961, Donald Michie build MENACE (the Machine Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine), a machine built from matchboxes and beads that was able to learn how to play noughts and crosses. In this talk I will explain how it is possible to make matchboxes learn and I will show off the copy of Michie's machine that I have built.
Sam Hartburn - Hexagonal Games
A brief description of three board games involving hexagons.
John Bibby - World Maths Year & the need for more maths t-shirts
Did World Maths Year 2000 have any lasting impact? Can WMY2020 do better? I am floating ideas and going to try to make it happen. But how?
Michael Gibson - Guess Who missed a trick! (Turn and face the ternary)
Is yours bald? Do they have blue eyes? Do they have a spot on their neck? What do you mean you don't know?!
Paul Walter - Let epsilon be 1
What happens if you don't believe in real numbers and still try to do calculus and how can you explain integration to 12-year olds.
Martin Whitworth - Numerical frieze patterns
A simple rule generates grids of numbers with a frieze symmetry and an interesting geometrical connection.
Kathy Cohen - Going round in circles...
Taking a familair sequence and applying modulo arithmetic produces interesting results.
Ben Sparks - Eine kleine Mathmusik
Some music may happen
Sunday
Session 2a : 08:50 - 09:37
Christian Lawson-Perfect - A clever horse - theory and applications
In short, I taught a tiny horse to count.
Paul Taylor - Binary numbers: a suggested improvement
Geoff Morley - A schoolboy's surprise for Professor Tutte
Bill Tutte constructed the first 'blemish-free' perfect squared square but missed simpler ways based on what a schoolboy showed him on a blackboard years later.
Callum Mulligan - Art and Mathematics: A tale of logic and creativity
I have recently worked on a couple of interactive art installations, I will be speaking about the mathematics involved and how this has and is to be applied in a gallery setting.
Sue de Pomerai - Moessner's magic
An interesting pattern in number theory - sadly no magic involved!
Alistair Bird - Solomon Golomb
Robert Low - Arithmetic for the (three-fingered) mathematicia
We all learn to do arithmetic in base ten because that's the norm. Many of us learn to do arithmetic in base two because that's how computers do it. Fortunately, there's an alternative which is better than both, and that's what I want to talk about.
Session 2b : 10:00 - 10:47
Gina Worth - Spirolaterals, maybe with a bit of time travel
Spirolaterals are nice little doodles which throw up some maths/patterns. As for time travel I wanted to show a little of what I read on it for my dissertation in 1998 and to find out if anyone has an update on it.
Will Kirkby - Bricks, Plates, and Patterns
Nicholas Korpelainen - Alice and Bob eat some pizza
Alice and Bob play a game: they cut a pizza into slices of various sizes, and alternatley choose slices according to a few simple rules. Who is able to eat more pizza?
Katie Steckles - Spreadsheet on my phone/Multiples of nine
I'd like to share some maths I did in a spreadsheet on my phone, while out and about, concerning multiples of nine.
Nicholas Jackson - Fractran
Fractran is a Turing-complete programming language devised by John Conway, in which programs consist of lists of rational numbers. I'll show some example programs, and try to explain how it works.
Tiago - Dactylonomy in 7 ways
For MathsJam 6, the 7th meeting of the mathematically inclined person, I intend to show another 500 year old magic trick in seven variants.
Matt Parker - Letterwise Magic Squares
Matt Parker will talk about a thing he found on the 8 April 2016, which has the SHA-1 hash 475301fd3b5d2ba37ebb6be33f5376d7529a3f67
Session 2c : 11:15 - 11:48
Karen Hancock - APs of Perfect squares
Noel France - Pillow Problem 49 and a cube of cheese
David Mitchell - Lattice Labyrinth Tessellations
Lattice labyrinths are a family of infinite families of highly symmetrical monohedral tesselations set out on the square lattice. The bewildering shapes of the polyomino tiles belie the elegant simplicity of their construction. I can generate an LL tessellation for most (sorry, Cantor, I mean "many") number pairs (d,m) where, for instance, d can be the day and m the month of your birthday or mathematics jamboree, while the study of number pairs can lead us into some fun "elementary" (they all say that, but it is) number theory employing the complex plane. As for polyiamonds, that's another story.
John Read - Code Club and a 'Number' poem
A brief introduction to the joys of running a Code Club at primary school level (assuming nobody has done this before at MathsJam?), seguing into a fairly daft poem in 72 (or possibly even 512) words.
Carlos Santos - A mathematical autopsy
Tony Mann - Alex Elmsley and the Hamming Code
At around the same time as Richard Hamming was exploring his error-correcting codes, the mathematical magician Alex Elmsley came up with a similar idea in one of his mind-reading tricks.
Session 2d : 12:06 - 12:39
Joel Haddley - How Many Pizzas?
Monohedral disk tilings, like pizzas, come in many flavours. Some flavours allow for retilings with interesting combinatorial properties.
James Grime - The Building Houses Problem
My favourite problem I've learnt in the last couple of years.
Dominika Vasilkova - Cardioids in Coffee Cups
I look at an interesting thing happening (quite literally) right under our noses.