MathsJam Gathering 2026
The 2026 MathsJam Gathering will take place on the weekend of 14-15 November 2026, at Kent's Hill Park in Milton Keynes.
The list of talks given below is provisional, and subject to change. 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.
Saturday
Session 1a - 13:30-14:10
MathsJam Team: Welcome to MathsJam
Welcome to MathsJam
Katie Steckles: Every Day I'm Shuffling
Katie has recently acquired a card shuffling machine, which has prompted some questions about how the machine shuffles cards, and the maths behind shuffling in general.
Mike Frost: Real-world control theory
In recent MathsJams, we have had some excellent talks about Control Theory. I am a maths graduate who has just retired from a 40-year career in control and systems engineering, so I wanted to share some of my experiences. The systems I controlled were rather larger than the electronic systems which are usually presented as examples.
I’d like to tell you about control theory problems - and solutions - in a steel rolling mill.
Claire Cohen: Which times table is best... for amigurumi!?
A talk about how the shape of a 3D crochet object or stuffed toy is affected by the amount of increases, and the rather satisfying way these can be worked to create different effects.
Justin Roughley: Something knotty
If you like Celtic knots then...
Tarim: What is cheating?
Some maths questions have loop-holes - but does this mean that answers which exploit this are cheating?
Session 1b - 14:40-15:20
Colin Beveridge: The 0th Row of Pascal's Triangle
Pascal's triangle gets even MORE interesting if you make it continuous.
Catherine Flick: Maths and... ethics?
Why mathematicians should care about ethics (and why they probably actually already do, even if they don't know it).
Dave Hartburn: Fretting about rockin'
A couple of year ago, I bought a guitar tool, a fret rocker. The talk goes into why it is the shape it is, and the maths behind a guitar fretboard.
David Lyford-Tilley: How to do a Fourier transform in your head
Since 1822 we've had the idea that you can break a function down into its component frequencies. I'll explain how you - yes you! - can do this in your head.
The mathematics of sewing
We're surrounded by textiles but often we don't give them a second thought unless they're damaged or get in our way. This talk will go through the mathematics from manufacturing to repair of every day items and how to make it more accessible to inspire more people to get into sewing and its mathematics
Session 1c - 15:50-16:30
Miles Gould: Navier-Stokes and the Murder of the Impossible
Or "I Climbed Four Unclimbed Peaks In Kyrgyzstan Despite The Existence Of Helicopters; Here's What That Taught Me About The Future Of Mathematics".
Since the announcement of a solution to the Navier-Stokes Millennium problem, a lot of people have been opining about what AI means for mathematics. Many of them use mountain-based metaphors, but most are not mountaineers. I am, and the situation reminds me of a particular incident from the history of climbing that maybe shows us a way forward.
Michael Thompson: Solving a Squared Rectangle Puzzle Using Electricity
I solve a maths puzzle live using 10 resistors and a multimeter.
Phil Ramsden: Cycling in a polygonal rabbit-hole
Take an n-sided polygon. Put non-negative integers on its vertices. Put the absolute values of their differences at the midpoints. This makes a new n-sided polygon, and you can repeat the process as many times as you like, creating a beautiful numerical dance. What happens if you let the dance go on and on? John Hoskinson posed this question in a great talk three years ago, and this is my third attempt to answer it, at least in part (missed the deadline one year, came down with flu the next). It's SO fascinating. I WILL give this talk.
Sam Hartburn: The Dangers of Being a Pet Rock
A question I read in a maths textbook made a claim about pet rocks. I doubted the truth of that claim, so I investigated futher. In my talk I will present the results of that investigation.
Peter Rowlett: Superdominoes
Dominoes are tiles with two numbers on. Mathematically, we can think of them as 1D line segments with each end labelled with a number. Superdominoes are an extension of this idea to higher dimensions.
Session 1d - 17:00-18:00
Matthew Scroggs: 5 by 5 nonograms
Inspired by the collaborative effort to solve every 5 by 5 nonogram puzzle in 2025, Scroggs has been playing with nonograms and made a cool thing...
Martin Whitworth: Least action
A simple principle can be used to derive particle trajectories without recourse to Newton's laws of motion.
Tony Mann: How do we know what is 2+2?
We learn basic addition at the beginning of our maths education, but how do we know that what we are told is true? This talk will resolve any doubts you might have about 2+2 by providing two entertaining arguments establishing its value beyond doubt.
Zeno Norris: Discovering Mathematics: The Joy of Understanding
How does it feel to unravel mathematical concepts that were penned hundreds of years ago? A second year university student experience with academic learning.
Michael Borcherds: Inside Out: Fabricating and Solving the Flexatube
The Flexatube is a deceptively simple topological puzzle from the 1930s, popularized by Martin Gardner. I’ll introduce this fascinating curiosity, share my experiments with different ways of fabricating them, and demonstrate some mind-bending solutions to turning them completely inside out.
Belgin Seymenoglu: The Threads and Tangents host score formula
If you're hosting a round on Threads and Tangents, everyone else gets a score based on how many answers they got correct, but...what score should the host team earn? Luckily, Martin Harris has a formula for that, and Belgin couldn't help notice a few things about its structure...
Saturday Night Tables: Elevator Pitches
Sunday
Session 2a - 9:30-10:10
Colin Wright: The Jaunty Squares Theorem
Sometimes there are results that can be proved by using the powerful techniques that we take for granted, but which have a neat, clean, elegant proof. In this talk we’ll look at one such result that ends up giving an unexpected corollary.
Elinor Flavell: How long is a piece of string? Exploring a 216-year-old book of measurements designed for Young Ladies
Today we use millimetres, centimetres, meters, inches, feet, yards and many other units to measure the world around us - but what were we using 216 years ago?
Mats Vermeeren: Rattleback dynamics
Rotating bodies often have counterintuitive properties. A rattleback is a prime example of this. It spins very happily in one direction, but emphatically objects to spinning in the other direction. Let's find out why!
Harlan Connor: Maths in medieval swordfighting pedagogy
During the Renaissance, the fencing masters decided there was a deep connection between waving a stick around and constructive geometry, and worked to present their instruction in mathematical terms. The complete lack of any such connection was not going to stop them...
Expect crazy diagrams that make even category theorists tremble in fear, and a crazy woman waving a stick around while saying random geometry facts (very safely and with approval from the MathsJam team for each action ofc!)
Callum Ilkiw-Jenkins: Recurrence and Solo maths adventures
My talk is about 2 things:
The Golden ratio and how to force other ratios with weird recurrence rules.
How to still find joy in independently exploring maths. Taking a general space of ideas and just routing around. "
Session 2b - 10:40-11:20
Andrew Taylor: This 1998 computer game is topologically impossible
Populous The Beginning (PC, 1998) allowed players to view, explore, and conquer entire planets. But spheres are confusing to play on and hard to program, so let's talk about how they faked it, and what else we can do using the same trick.
Zoe Griffiths: Quest for the Most Mathematically Sensible Name
Zoe takes us on a tour of her quest for the most mathematically sensible name (with no overlap with her talk from last year).
Tom Briggs : A Year of Maths in Museums
Quickfire examples of maths that I have found in museums this year, ending with a call to action.
Professor Hamish McSporran : Sudoku and the Phistomefel Ring
Simple introduction to the Phistomefel Ring, its proof and how it can help you impress your Sudoku-solving friends.
Christian Lawson-Perfect: I can't believe it's 1!
I once noticed the number one. This is my story.
Session 2c - 11:50-12:30
Jen Sparks: Catching my drift
How to ensure you reach your destination when navigating in the air.
Nicholas Jackson: The Mathematics of Magic
A look at some of the ways mathematics has been used in SF and fantasy to represent magic, an esoteric discipline with strange words and arcane symbols, which takes many years of mysterious and dangerous study to perfect. Including block transfer computation, symbolic logic spells, and the Turing-Lovecraft Theorem.
Gavan Fantom: Multiplying Polynomials for Fun and Profit
We're taught to use the distributive property to multiply polynomials, but it's not the only way to do it. We explore how a different way of representing polynomials reveals some interesting symmetries that we can exploit to speed up the process, and rediscover an algorithm that you may already be familiar with from another context.
Matt Peperell: Tricks in Maths
It's sometimes useful to know shortcuts with laborious or tedious processes. Some techniques can be generalised. Here I present a compilation of ideas which cannot be.
Competition admin
Session 2d - 13:30-14:30
Clare Wallace: How to make a quilt
Making a patchwork quilt is a process of cutting fabric into smaller pieces and then joining those pieces together into bigger ones, over and over again. In this talk we ask: what’s the best way to do it? And what’s the worst?!
Donald Bell: Using AI to design an entry for the Competition Competition
I consulted various AI systems with the problem "help me design something for the Competition Competition". They all came up with lots of ideas and obscure mathematical theorems. But they also had one thing in common "use Pick's Theorem". So I said "OK, help me out" and they did!
Bob Huxley: Hilbert vs Aleph 0
An exceptional court case...
Louise Mabbs: Mani-fold, a Shape Book Project
(details TBC)
Rob Low: Fractions of infinity
What does it mean to talk about three quarters of a countably infinite set? I'll explain why that's hard, what we can do about it, and why it's a bit subtle.
Alison Kiddle: Paper folding and platonic solids
There's a neat fold to make a 60 degree angle from a rectangular piece of paper. Starting with this fold, I'll show a sequence of cool things you can make with the resulting equilateral triangles.