News

Earlier this month, some year 12 maths students went to The Space to attend a series of 3 talks at the maths symposium. This year the guest speakers were, Alison Kiddle, James Grime and Zoe Griffiths. 

Alison Kiddle: 

Alison discussed probability in the context of gambling/the lottery and micromorts (the unit for chance of death). At first, she made us all stand up and guess whether a coin would land on heads or tails, if you were wrong you sat down. This was to show us that there was a 1 in 128 chance of being the last one standing as it took 7 flips with 2 options (1/27). She then used her experience on ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire’ to further this idea. Here she got to the £250,00 question with minimal issues, however, for the £500,000 question, she couldn’t decide between 2 of the answers. She had a 50/50 chance of winning half a million but chose to take the £250,000 instead of taking the gamble. 

She then discussed micromorts, and how certain activities are more dangerous than others. She used hand gliding and scuba diving as examples of extreme hobbies and asked us at the start which we thought was more dangerous. She then used different modes of transport to teach us about micromorts. She compared cars, bicycles and a train, we learnt that a train is by far the safest. She then asked us the start question again to see if our opinion had changed. 

James Grime: 

James discussed with us secret codes and how Wi-Fi works. We first learnt that Wi-Fi uses constantly changing frequencies to make sure peoples constantly get their own individual service. He then brought up a volunteer to show how this could stop a message being intercepted. There was an order that the frequencies would go through that the volunteer wasn't aware of, they were then asked to stand in front of which frequency they thought was the next. On the back of each paper was a letter. The person only managed to intercept 2 letters; however, this didn't affect our ability to read the message. 

He then discussed the Enigma Code and the Lorenz machine of the Second World War. He showed (with pictures) how the Lorenz Machine worked. They had a series of interchangeable cogs that would scramble the true message though a template, making it illegible to those without a second machine with the same order of cogs within it. 

He also spoke briefly about binary. He taught us how it's used to send messages; each letter has a corresponding code which is sent from place to place.  

Zoe Griffiths: 

Zoe talked about her favourite shapes and the reasoning behind them: 

Mobius strip: its one sided and when cut half, doesn’t turn into 2 loops, but one larger loops with another twist in it. In 3D an example is a klein flask, a bottle with one side that is notoriously difficult to fill. 

Taurus: commonly known as a doughnut shape, its her favourite as it can technically be turned into a mug. It is also a remarkably stable shape, and this can be shown via smoke rings, if undisturbed they can travel vast distances, for example, all the way across the room.