Maths on the Move

Living Proof: Timandra Harkness – How to make maths funny

"What's a statistician's favourite sandwich filling?..."
Timandra Harkness – presenter, writer, comedian and Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society – told our friends Dan Aspel and Maha Kaouri her favourite maths joke in this episode of the Living Proof podcast from the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences.
Timandra Harkness
 
Timandra brilliantly chaired several sessions of the Communicating mathematics for the public event at the Newton Gateway to Mathematics. In this podcast Timandra spoke about how to make maths funny, and how she came to fall in love with mathematics from an arts and humanities background.
Oh and the punchline to Timandra's favourite joke? You'll have to listen to the podcast to find out!
 
00:00 – Introduction00:44 – Welcome, discussing Communicating mathematics for the public03:38 – Origins of Timandra's interest in maths, understanding "enough to ask the right questions"07:50 – Discussing Timandra's book Big Data – Does Size Matter?11:10 – Other current projects and shows, writing another book about "why everything is personalised"13:13 – Mingling an arts background with a mathematics focus, "coming out as a closet mathematician"17:10 – How do you make maths funny as a comedian? … "What's a statistician's favourite sandwich filling?"21:10 – Future projects
 
This podcast was inspired by the Communicating mathematics for the public event at the Newton Gateway to Mathematics in January 2023.
 
(If that joke tickles your funny bone – try this one!)
 
This podcast is part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) – you can find all the content from our collaboration here. The INI is an international research centre and our neighbour here on the University of Cambridge's maths campus. It attracts leading mathematical scientists from all over the world, and is open to all. Visit www.newton.ac.uk to find out more.
 

Living Proof: Hannah Thomas – Making data accessible

Having empathy with your audience – with all your audiences – is the first step for making your content accessible. Hannah Thomas of the Government Analysis Function explained this in her brilliant talk at the Communicating mathematics for the public event at the Newton Gateway to Mathematics. Hannah's talk was full of insights and practical ideas on how to make all content published online easy to access and use for all users, regardless of impairment, medical condition or disability.
Our friends Dan Aspel and Maha Kaouri spoke to Hannah for this episode of the Living Proof podcast from the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. Hannah told them about her work helping to make government data more accessible, the common pitfalls of data accessibility and tips and tricks that can help. They also find our why more people used to get married at the end of the tax year...
Hannah Thomas speaking at the Communicating mathematics for the public event
 
00:00 – Introduction00:44 – Welcome, discussing “Communicating Mathematics for the Public” (“as entertaining as Disneyland Paris and definitely more inspiring”)04:20 – All about Government Analysis Function, a love of data journalism, career history13:35 – Visualising data and making digital information accessible21:40 – Common accessibility pitfalls24:20 – Plans for the future… e-learning resources
 
This podcast was inspired by the Communicating mathematics for the public event at the Newton Gateway to Mathematics in January 2023. For more information we strongly recommend you watch Hannah's talk from that event, Data Visualisation and Digital Accessibility: What We Can Do to Help.
 
This podcast is part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) – you can find all the content from our collaboration here. The INI is an international research centre and our neighbour here on the University of Cambridge's maths campus. It attracts leading mathematical scientists from all over the world, and is open to all. Visit www.newton.ac.uk to find out more.

Living Proof: Communicating from the frontiers of mathematics

We are very happy to work closely with our neighbours, the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI), to help explain, celebrate and publicise the research that happens at the Institute. But what challenges does that present? And why should it happen in the first place?
Following on from the Communicating mathematics for the public event at the Newton Gateway to Mathematics we spoke to the INI's Dan Aspel about our work in this episode of the Living Proof podcast. You can find all the content from our collaboration here.
Communicating from the mathematical frontiers - from plotting a path to the highest peak to exploring the hidden depths.
 
 
 
00:00 – Introduction00:44 – Welcome, discussing Communicating Mathematics for the Public, the importance of trustworthiness05:30 – Who you're speaking to vs what you're saying07:38 – Making higher mathematics accessible to audiences: "any bit of mathematics either comes from somewhere, or is going somewhere, or both"14:20 – Are there incommunicable subjects?16:55 – The rarity of maths "headlines"19:25 – The partnership between INI and Plus magazine – why is it important?23:25 – Are some topics inherently more interesting?25:26 – What is the end goal of maths communication? "I would love it if people could see how maths is everywhere… that maths is a language of rhythms and patterns"30:00 – Looking to the future
This podcast was inspired by the Communicating mathematics for the public event at the Newton Gateway to Mathematics in January 2023. You can watch our talk from that event, Trust, time and truth, that was about our collaboration with JUNIPER modelling consortium.
This podcast is part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) – you can find all the content from our collaboration here. The INI is an international research centre and our neighbour here on the University of Cambridge's maths campus. It attracts leading mathematical scientists from all over the world, and is open to all. Visit www.newton.ac.uk to find out more.
 

On the mathematical frontline: Tom Irving

Here at Plus, we were very grateful for Tom Irving's work during the COVID-19 pandemic. He was the Co-Head of the secretariat of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Modelling group (otherwise known as SPI-M). One of his responsibilities was writing the consensus statements that came out of SPI-M, summarising current understanding of the mathematical advice to the UK government. We found these incredibly useful when reporting on the pandemic.
We finally met Tom when we were both speaking at the Communicating mathematics for the public event in January 2023 at the Newton Gateway to Mathematics in Cambridge. In this podcast Tom tells us about providing a bridge between policy and mathematics, the importance of transparency, and the joy of the R number being discussed at the hairdressers.
This episode is part of On the mathematical frontline, a special series of the Plus podcast which explores the work of mathematicians grappling with the unprecedented challenge of studying a live pandemic unfolding in front of their eyes. In this series we interview our colleagues in the JUNIPER modelling consortium, whose research and insights have fed into SPI-M and SAGE - the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, both of whom advise the UK government on the scientific aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
You can watch Tom's talk on the Challenges in Communicating the Results of SAGE's Covid Modelling, and you can find all our work covering COVID-19 here.
This podcast is part of our collaboration with JUNIPER, the Joint UNIversity Pandemic and Epidemic Response modelling consortium.
JUNIPER comprises academics from the universities of Cambridge, Warwick, Bristol, Exeter, Oxford, Manchester, and Lancaster, who are using a range of mathematical and statistical techniques to address pressing question about the control of COVID-19. You can see more content produced with JUNIPER here.

Sexual statistics

If you've ever been lucky enough to meet David Spiegelhalter, or hear him talk in person or on TV or radio, you'll know he tells a great story. And the stories he told in his 2015 book Sex by numbers were fascinating and highly entertaining, as well giving us the tools to critically assess the statistics we read every day in the news. And sex is back in the news as the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles that featured in his book is being conducted again this year. Who knows what stories will come out of the next survey?
We were very happy to start 2023 with catching up with David (the first time in person since the pandemic!) at the Communicating mathematics for the public event that we were both speaking at in the Newton Gateway to Mathematics in Cambridge. We hope you enjoy this interview with him from 2015, where he gives us some of his favourite snippets from the book, and some easy ways you can think more critically about statistics. (You can also watch our interview as a video or read the associated article.)

What are liquid metal batteries

The world needs to move to renewable energy sources, such as solar or wind. The problem with those is that they're intermittent. That's because the Sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow. What we need, then, are efficient ways of storing energy: efficient batteries. Currently lithium ion batteries are being used but there are issues around their cost, how long they last, and their safety.
 
Donald Sadoway
Hope is on the horizon in the form of liquid metal batteries. At a recent event organised by the Newton Gateway to Mathematics in Cambridge we met Donald Sadoway who played a very important role in pioneering these batteries. In this podcast he talks to us what they are and why they are better, when they'll be commercially available, and why sometimes it's best to ignore the experts.
To watch a talk given by Sadoway at the Newton Gateway event go to the Newton Gateway website. And to find out more about magnetohydrodynamics, a theory that has been used to describe liquid metal batteries, go here.

A 60% chance of rain: Weather, climate, and how to deal with uncertainty

Will climate change leave the region you live in hotter and drier, or wetter and stormier? It's a question of utmost importance in many areas of the world, yet it's one that climate scientists can't answer. This is why world-leading climate scientist Tim Palmer is calling for a high-performance supercomputing centre dedicated entirely to climate change.
Tim Palmer.
We were lucky enough to meet Palmer at a recent event organised by the Newton Gateway to Mathematics In Cambridge. In this podcast we talk to Palmer about this call for a "CERN for climate change" and why climate forecasting requires so much computing power in the first place. Palmer also tells us about a technique for dealing with uncertainty called ensemble forecasting, and what his work has taught him about uncertainty more generally, as it crops up in many areas of life and nature.
Tim Palmer's new book on the science of uncertainty, The primacy of doubt, is published by Oxford University Press. To learn more about climate models see this article. To learn about weather forecasting see this article, and to read about uncertainty more general click here.
This podcast was produced as part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) – you can find all the content from our collaboration here. The INI is an international research centre and our neighbour here on the University of Cambridge's maths campus. It attracts leading mathematical scientists from all over the world, and is open to all. Visit www.newton.ac.uk to find out more.

Are the constants of nature really constant?

There are some numbers you can rely on. The speed of light, c, is 299,792,458 ms-1. The gravitational constant, G, is 6.674 x 10-11m3kg-1s-2. These are examples of what are often called the constants of nature – fundamental physical quantities that seem to be the same everywhere, and unchanging over time.
Or are they? Today would have been our wonderful boss, John D. Barrow's, 70th birthday. And to celebrate him and his work we look at the answer to this question in today's podcast.
John D. Barrow (Image credit: Tom Powell)
Over time, since these constants were discovered, people had hoped to find a theory, a great theory of everything, that would explain why these particular values had arisen. However, as John explains in this podcast, developments in recent decades, in areas such as string theory, have shown that these constants could take any value. And this provided the motivation for studying whether such constants might be changing in value.
John, together with the astronomer John Webb, initiated an observational programme looking at the light produced by quasars in the distant Universe. They developed new techniques to analyse the light to test if certain constants had the same value near a quasar as they did in laboratories here on Earth.
You can find out more about this aspect of John’s work in this podcast, and read more in his accompanying article: Are the constants of nature really constant? And you can find out more about some of John's other work and interests in his many Plus articles.
This interview was recorded in 2009 as part of our celebration of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, where we tried to answer the questions everyone wanted to ask about the Universe

Stadium maths

Amid much controversy, the 2022 World Cup has begun and the action has now moved onto the football pitches inside the many newly built stadiums in Qatar. But how are these stadiums turned from architectural sketches into real buildings?
For this week's episode we delve back far into our archive to hear from Paul Shepherd from the University of Bath, an expert in building football stadiums such as the famous Emirates stadium in London. In this interview, first recorded back in 2007, he tells us about what kind of things are important in building a stadium, how maths is an integral part of the design process, and why his work required him to listen to Belgian techno.
The Emirates Stadium, home of the Arsenal football club. (Photo Arne Müseler – CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)
 
You can hear more about the maths behind famous sporting buildings in our recent podcast How the velodrome found its form. And you can find out much more about the maths behind football and sports, and behind engineering and architecture here on Plus.

Voices from Ukraine: Yuriy Semenov

Yuriy Semenov was forced to leave Ukraine, and his work at the Institute of Hydromechanics at the National Academy of Sciences, due to the Russian invasion of February 2022. He found sanctuary in Britain at the University of East Anglia. In part this was thanks to the Solidarity for mathematicians programme ran by the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI).
In this podcast Yuriy speaks to the INI's Dan Aspel and shares his experience of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and why the work of a mathematicians is always possible.
We are very pleased to host this episode of the Living Proof podcast as part of our collaboration with the wonderful INI.