MathsJam Gathering 2024
This is a list of talks which were given at the 2024 MathsJam Gathering, including links to slides where available. If you spot any mistakes on this page, or would like to update the description of your talk, use the 'Edit this page' link at the bottom with a GitHub account to propose changes and make a pull request.
The list of Saturday Night Table activities which ran at the 2024 gathering can be found here.
Andrew Taylor has produced a poster of the things that happened at MathsJam 2024. There is also a Cake page here with the photos of cakes entered in the cake competition.
The list of items and pictures of items on the Tables at the Back is here.
The details of the Competition Competition can be found here.
Pictures of the Cake Competition can be found here.
Saturday
Session 1a
James Grime: A Difficult Dice Game
A tricky dice game for us to try! If you throw seven dice, can you guarantee to be able to arrange the results into a seven-digit number that's divisible by a particular factor? What are the chances if it's 2? What about 7?
Gavan Fantom: So how does your calculator do trigonometry, anyway?
There are a number of different ways to compute sines and cosines, but most of them are intensive in their use of computational resources. We take a look at an approach that can be done without multiplication or division, as found in many calculators and low power computers.
Jonathan Welton: The Infinite Glass Bead Game
The game of Mancala may, or may not, be more than 7,000 years old, but is certainly one of the oldest abstract board games still played. What happens if we take it's move mechanism and apply it to an infinite linear board. Is the eventual result of the game predictable, or can it continue indefinitely without ever settling into a clear pattern?
Kirsty Fish: Who wants to be a trillionaire?
A layperson’s guide to trillionairism and how it’s something we can all achieve. Kind of.
Alison Kiddle: Is that your final answer?
Sometimes, in maths and in life, questions are asked in an ambiguous way. In this talk, Alison shared some ambiguous questions and challenged us to be on the lookout for ambiguity to move towards a more understanding and compassionate world.
Session 1b
Paul Livesey: Solving a Competitive Programming Problem Using Maths
In this talk I demonstrated how Day 10 of Advent of Code from 2023 can be solved programmatically in several different ways before hitting it with some maths and using the Shoelace Formula and Pick's Theorem.
Spoilers: Using maths was quicker and easier.
Tiago Hirth: Culture, Language and Maths
In 2019 I missed my first ever MathsJam, the reason, an opportunity to travel to Mozambique and take part in the Congress of Mathematics Space in Portuguese Language. While there I chased traditional board games, recreational mathematics and got to investigate a little on the awe inspiring heritage Paulus Gerdes left behind.
Mats Vermeeren: Athletics track geometry
There are a lot of lines on a standard 400m running track, bounding the lanes and marking the start and finish of different events. The finish line is always the same straight line. The start lines are more interesting. Some of them are staggered to account for the difference in lap length depending on the lane, others are curves. What is the mathematical description of these curves? Do the same curves occur in other places?
Michael Gibson: And Ninthly
Having once made the mistake of asking for a pizza to be cut into nine pieces, with hilarious consequences, I have since considered various methods of cutting a pizza equally into ninths. I will share some of these with you in this talk (methods, that is, not slices of pizza).
Nicole Cozens: Mathematical Modelling
The conversation on students lips for the last 10\<x\<1000 years: would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses, or 1 horse-sized duck? Rather than randomly arguing, surely maths can help us come to a good conclusion?
Session 1c - 15:50-16:30:
Peter Rowlett: 9999713179999 is prime
Primes that can be reversed to give another prime are called emirp. Concatenating a prime and an emirp, overlapping the middle digit, gets you a primemirp. Peter played around with these after Katie Steckles spoke about them in a Finite Group livestream. His playing led to some code that found new values not listed in the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences - but they are now!
Kevin Houston: Who was the Nicolson in the Crank-Nicolson method?
The Crank-Nicolson method is fundamental in the theory of numerically solving differential equations. What many users of the method find surprising is that for a method from over 70 years ago one of its authors was a woman.
Phyllis Nicolson was a PhD student whose work was inspired during the Second World War from what was then the particularly urgent problem of understanding combustion. Her work is remarkable for its significant impact and the fact that she was working at a time when, for example, women were not allowed full membership of the University of Cambridge.
In this talk I'll explain why the method is important and say something about the life of this "hidden figure" who deserves to be better known than she is.
Stas Grinberg: L-systems and sharp pencils
Lindenmayer system is a formal grammar that allows you to create realistic 3-D models of plants (and pencils). I will show you both.
Clare Wallace: Statis-skittle Analysis
Famously, Skittles claim that every packet is unique. We know that's not true - but can we say anthing more? After a year of encouraging people to count and eat their Skittles, I have some statis-skittle claims to make (and some more Skittles to eat)
Robin Houston & John Read: Polyhedra inspired by a Stand-up Maths video
A few months ago, Matt Parker made a video about Robin's newly-discovered single-angle polyhedron (one whose adjacent faces meet at right-angles, except on one edge), inspiring viewers to send in their own examples of single-angle polyhedra. Meanwhile, another Matt Parker video about a different shape - discovered by computer - inspired John to play around with generating polyhedra within a unit sphere using some terrible Python code.
Session 1d
Sarah Denison and Tom Button: Disrupting the 'One great man' narrative in mathematics
The ‘One great man’ theory suggests that history can be explained by the impact of great men. This is the lens through which a lot of the history of mathematics is often viewed. An alternative, more inclusive, approach is to name theorems/results with mathematical names and not after people.
Sam Hansen: A Narrative Structure Game
In this talk Sam will present a new game where the audience will be asked to match narrative structures to a part of mathematical life
Katie Steckles: Group Theory and Rubik's Cube
Katie showed us some fun things she's been playing with recently to do with the group theory behind Rubik's cube, including a discovery of Roger Penrose's about the structure of the group, and a new type of Rubik's cube she's made to sell on Maths Gear.
Bruce and Hamish (Edinburgh Mathjam Mathscot): SET Square
How to make a 3 by 3 Magic square using SET cards which has 12 SETs in it (WOW) and it will also include a fun SET activity suitable for MathsJams.
Christian Lawson-Perfect: Please don't overthink this (I already have)
Christian has been pondering the best way to cut as many 7cm squares out of a sheet of A4 as possible - and in what order should he make the cuts for maximum efficiency? One of the beautiful aspects of maths is finding unexpected complexity in simple systems. Christian will let you decide if this is one of those times.
Sunday
Session 2a
Ayliean MacDonald: Left/Right
Only at MathsJam could you combine the very 2010s vibe of Fatman Scoop’s less well known “Left Right” with a classic (Martin Gardner?) card trick. Depending on the orientation with which you hold the corners flipping the card can either alternate left and right or remain a constant left - make one yourself!
David Lyford-Tilley: It's a knockout! Stats in single elimination contests
From the Olympics to game shows, single-elimination is a common format - but it can lead to some surprising outcomes! I will share my experience running the largest single elimination tournament in history and discuss how mathematics helped make it possible, and what can be learned from it.
Adam Atkinson: Second differences, and fixing things with your ears.
Adam talked (without slides) about how second differences are something which help diagnose and fix problems with the voice quality on phone calls.
Karen Harris : Maths on Film
An ultra-quick overview of some beautiful, compelling -and gloriously weird- films about maths and mathematicians. And examples of mathematically-themed literature which haven't yet, but should be, made into films...
Matthew Scroggs: The Databet
I made a dataset containing 26 sets of coordinates, where each set has the same summary statistics but resembles a different letter of the alphabet.
Session 2b
Andrew Taylor: In Defence of IEEE Floating Point Arithmetic
The way computers do arithmetic has some surprising quirks, including a value called "minus zero" and another that's not equal to itself — but as much fun as it is to dunk on this nonsense, it's all there for a reason. Honest. Let's look at how and why compromising on the normal rules of can actually make computers more useful
Sujata B Sharma: The Curious Case of the Missing Digits
Can numbers lie? We'll delve into Benford's law, exploring real life applications, surprising exceptions and the math behind this fascinating phenomenon.
Tom Crawford: Pokémaths
An attempt to calculate how many wild Pokémon you would expect to encounter in order to "catch 'em all" in the original games (Generation I).
Keisha Thompson: Venn Diagram Poetry
Keisha shared a series of Venn Diagram poems linked to her DARE Art residency with Opera North, University of Leeds and the National Science and Media Museum.
Colin Beveridge: The Search For The Holy Grail
HyperRogue is a roguelike adventure game played on a hyperbolic plane. In the "Camelot" puzzle, the player needs to find a holy grail at the centre of a 28-cell circle. It's harder than it looks.
Session 2c
Tony Mann: A surprising number
Earlier this year I read about the remarkable number TREE(3). I was astonished that I hadn't known about this amazing number before, but talking to friends I found that others didn't know about it either. So my talk will attempt to introduce this extraordinary integer. For further information see "Fantastic numbers" by Antonio Padilla or watch his Numberphile videos on the topic.
Elizabeth Brocklebank: Authenticator Bingo
That handy little app that haunts our working lives... can we play games with Microsoft Authenticator?
Alexander Bolton: Covering Points with Disjoint Unit Discs
How many points must be placed in the plane so that no collection of disjoint (non-overlapping) unit discs can cover them? I will show, using the probabilistic method, that 10 points can always be covered. And I will also show a set of 45 points that cannot be covered.
Nettie Margolis: Interactive Probability: Moving Away from Coloured Sweets in Bags
Nettie encouraged a better narrative in simple probability - we can be creative. Rather than bags of sweets, why not wheelbarrows of microwaves and ducks? And will Nettie ever brave asking the audience for suggestions again?
Session 2d
Adam Townsend: Buying tomatoes in LA
How US packaging law allows for pre-packed fresh veg to be sold by both mass and volume inconsistently, specifically the use of the perplexing "dry pint"...
Matt Peperell: A peculiar property pertaining to pythagorean products
I recently learned of a property relating to Pythagorean triangles. In this talk I describe a method to generate them, and then go on to analyse them in order to surface this property
Ben Handley: An irrational question
Is e+pi or e×pi irrational? The question, in its obvious interpretation, is unsolved. But a cheeky logicians interpretation makes it quite straightforward: the answer is yes!
Hannah Gray: More Dutch Mathematical Tourism
Another reason to visit the Netherlands - the Leiden wall equations!
Miles Gould: Why our maps are getting pigeonholed
Our code (which civil engineers use to plan infrastructure like power lines) had a problem - as our customers' projects got larger and more complicated, we needed more layers of geographical features than we could represent. Thankfully, the Pigeonhole Principle came to our rescue.
Merry Martyn: The Titanic Birthday Problem
Have you ever thought to yourself, how many of the 2,200 passengers on the Titanic shared the same birthday? What was the most popular birthday? Was there one birthday which gave passengers increased survival odds? Unfortunately, this cannot be known as a large chunk of birthday data is missing from the passengers' records. Clearly, this is a birthday problem of titanic proportions.
Fortunately, statistics can help answer these questions - Hazzah! In fact, in medical statistics, there are many methods to predict missing data which are commonly used in clinical trial datasets. Can these techniques be applied to the Titanic Birthday Problem? Can we use this to conclude whether which a single birthday has an innate survival advantage in maritime disasters?