Maths in Action London Lectures

On Thursday Lower Sixth mathematicians were lucky to have the opportunity to visit the ‘Maths in Action’ lectures at the Emmanuel Centre in London. This A Level maths-focused ‘education in action’ event had various speakers lecture pupils from a variety of schools on a range of topics expanding our knowledge and leaving us keen to investigate further. 

Our first speaker, Dr Colin Wright, spoke with us about combinatorial game theory which discussed (combinatorial) games that: were finite, lacked chance, used perfect information and were impartial to each player. We looked at Nim, first playing it for ourselves and then investigating some of the maths that could be used to predetermine the winner of the game. After some more discussion, it was (shockingly) revealed that all combinatorial games are fundamentally some variation of Nim. 

Subsequent talks tended to have an overall theme on probability and finance. The second lecture discussed the misinformation spread by the news on a statistical level exemplifying the necessity for both an understanding of statistics and how to use them. The aptly named ‘How to get rich quick’ lecture was third and demonstrated how statistics can be used to make predictions in stocks trading alongside other useful tricks for traders. Fourth, was a look into risk and reward and how we use that to make informed decisions such as on popular TV game shows. Finally, chairperson Ben Sparks finished the evening with a talk on “Magical Maths”; magic in maths being a disguise for clever algebraic manipulation and number theory which was interesting either way. 

The article is unfortunately too short to distill all the information of the talks but hopefully this provides insight into what fun we had on the day. Many thanks to the Caterham school maths department, especially to Mr Hind and Dr Kemp for taking us into London. 

Jonathan W (L6)