Maths on the Move

We are getting very excited - next week is the International Congress of Mathematicians  (ICM)- one of the highlights of the mathematical calendar!  The ICM takes place every four years and it’s the biggest maths conference of them all, attracting thousands of participants, and also sees the awards of some very prestigious prizes, including the famous Fields medal. We are fortunate to have been able to interview the prize winners in advance of the conference, but that’s top secret and we won’t be revealing the winners till they are announced publicly in Helsinki next week!  We're really looking forward to sharing our interviews with you when we meet them in person in Helsinki next week, where we will also bring you all the news from the ICM itself. But in the meantime, to get us in the mood, let's revisit the 2018 ICM that took place in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.  It was a brilliant conference and the podcast you are about to hear was recorded on that very first days of the 2018 ICM, when all the big prizes were announced.  You can find all our coverage of the past three ICM’s by going  to plus.maths.org and searching for "ICM".   And stay tuned for our special series of podcasts, Maths on the Red Carpet, starting next week, that will bring you all our reporting from this years International Congress of Mathematicians.  But for now - enjoy the sounds of the Brazilian forest in this podcast revisiting the exciting first days of the 2018 ICM....

We all have our favoured methods of shuffling cards, but most of us don't think any more about it once we've started playing a game. But there's so much more to be discovered! In this podcast mathematician Cheryl Praeger and magician Will Houstoun reveal the maths and magic behind shuffling cards. And as this podcast, first published in March 2021, was the first podcast we produced in collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute, Dan Aspel also tells us all about the INI! You can watch Cheryl Praeger talk about the mathematics of shuffling in her Kirk Lecture at the INI in 2020. You can be astounded by Will Houstoun's magic, including the amazing trick we mentioned in the podcast, and find out more about his work as magician in residence at the Imperial College London and Royal College of Music Centre for Performance Science, at his website. And you can read all the details behind the maths and magic of shuffling in their Plus articles: The magic of shuffling and The mathematics of shuffling. This podcast was inspired by a talk given by Cheryl Praeger as part of the Groups, representations and applications programme at the Isaac Newton Institute. You can find out more about the maths behind this programme here.

In this episode we meet the irrepressible Anita Layton. As well as leading a busy research team, Anita also spends much of her downtime fostering diversity and mentorships throughout her networks, and is professionally engaged across disciplines as distinct as applied mathematics, computer science and the medical sciences. She was also voted one of 2021’s top 100 “Canada’s most powerful women”.   We are very pleased to host this episode of the Living Proof podcast as part of our collaboration with the wonderful  Isaac Newton Institute.  Plus editor, Marianne Freiberger,  joined the INI's Dan Aspel to interview the irrepressible Prof Anita Layton of the University of Waterloo, when she was a guest at INI for a week-long workshop on kinetic theory.  You can find out more about this fascinating area of maths on Plus. Thank you to Dan and the INI for allowing us to host this episode of Living Proof on our podcast.   You can find all the content from our collaboration with the INI here. 00:00 – Introduction 00:58 – Welcome 01:50 – Attending the “Frontiers in kinetic equations for plasmas and collective behaviour” workshop 06:44 – How do you stay on top of multiple fields? (“I don’t always understand every single slide in a talk!”) 12:50 – Fostering diversity in the sciences, connecting mentorships between different generations of female mathematicians 17:30 – Mathematics for “social good”? (“It excites me to do something that has meaning, that is impactful”) 19:16 – A personal history in the sciences, “I told you I don’t have a math degree. Let me tell you why…” 24:00 – Connecting kinetic theory, kidneys, blood flow and more

"We all work with exponential growth and we're really, really used to it, but we are still amazed at how fast things take off at the end." This is epidemiologist Matt Keeling talking about how a disease outbreak can still take you by surprise even if you've been working in the field for 25 years. Matt's team at the University of Warwick has been running one of the main models that have informed UK government on the COVID-19 pandemic. In this podcast Matt tells us about his work on the roadmap out of lockdown, whether the models have been too pessimistic, and what it's been like producing scientific results that carry so much weight. 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 the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Modelling group (otherwise known as SPI-M) and the now familiar SAGE - the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies , both of whom advise the UK government on the scientific aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic. To find out more about the work of Matt's team on the roadmap out of lockdown, see this article. You can see all of our content related to JUNIPER here.  

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death for men in the UK and second most for women. During the first lockdown from March 2020, elective cardiac procedures and outpatient consultations were postponed and many appointments have not yet been rescheduled. In addition, those who were suffering from heart conditions did not see their GP or come to hospital. The resulting backlog presents a huge challenge. In this podcast, first published in March 2021, we talk to cardiologist Ramesh Nadarajah and computer scientist Jessica Enright about a meeting at the Newton Gateway to Mathematics, which brought together clinicians and mathematicians to try to tackle the problem. The three-day brainstorming session, part of a programme of activities by the Virtual Forum for Knowledge Exchange in Mathematical Sciences, developed potential solutions that could also help reduce waiting lists for other conditions — and demonstrated the astonishing power mathematics can have even when you least expect it. This podcast, and the accompanying article, were produced as part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute (INI), which we talked about in our last episode.  You can find out more of our work with the INI here.

Have you every wondered about what goes on behind the scenes of Plus? Find out in this special guest episode!  We are very pleased to be collaborating with the wonderful  Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) in Cambridge. Recently Plus editors Marianne Freiberger and Rachel Thomas appeared on the INI's Living Proof podcast, talking to the INI's communication's manager Dan Aspel.  We talked to Dan about mathematical journalism, spreading a love of numbers, and our new collaboration with the INI. Topics touched upon include our late boss, the wonderful John Barrow, the many joys of being a maths communicator, and the thrill that comes from finding and inspiring audiences with the most unusual of subjects. Thank you to Dan and the INI for allowing us to host this episode of Living Proof on our podcast.   You can find all the content from our collaboration with the INI here. 00:00 – Introduction00:47 – Welcome01:30 – A little background about Marianne04:05 – A little background about Rachel07:12 – A tribute to John Barrow08:36 – Choosing communication over research11:40 – Who is the average +Plus reader?13:25 – The appeal of +Plus17:05 – “Maths and hallucinations” (an article with “quite interesting comments”)22:05 – Collaborating with INI30:32 – Plans for the future32:45 – Terrible coffee… but good conversation

It's amazing what you can see now thanks to remote imaging technology! Visiting far away landscapes via satellite images or watching live feeds from a famous street is fun, but remotely gathered images offer exciting opportunities to map and observe the world. The problem is that the vast amount of remotely gathered data now available is useless on its own – we need to have the means to analyse and extract information from those images. This is exactly what the members of the INTEGRAL project, researchers based at the University of Cambridge and researchers and industry partners in India, are working on. This is an innovative collaboration between people collecting remote sensing data – such as satellite images of forests and video from traffic cameras – and researchers developing the technology to analyse those remotely gathered images to answer meaningful questions.   Some of the members of the INTEGRAL team who spoke to us over zoom. From top left: Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb, James Woodcock, Angelica Aviles-Rivero, Saurabh Pandey, Sanjay Bisht, Debmita Bandyopadhyay, Rihuan Ke, David Coomes.   In this podcast we talk to some of the members of the INTEGRAL team about the innovative machine learning approaches they are developing to understand remotely gathered images, and the significant impact these technologies can have on the world. Our thanks to Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb, James Woodcock, Angelica Aviles Rivero, Debmita Bandyopadhyay, Rihuan Ke and David Coomes, all from the University of Cambridge, and to Saurabh Pandey from KritiKal Solutions and Sanjay Bisht from IORA Ecological Solutions, both based in India. You can read more about the INTEGRAL team's work in Seeing traffic through new eyes and about their new AI approaches in Maths in a minute: Semi-supervised machine learning. And you can find much more information about machine learning and image analysis on Plus.

How do you go about predicting something as complex as the Earth's climate? In this podcast — featuring climate modelling experts Emily Shuckburgh and Chris Budd — we explore what those climate models look like, the uncertainties involved in climate modelling, and also why the predictions need to be taken seriously despite those uncertainties. We also look at the simplest climate model of them all— the energy balance model — and explain the famous butterfly effect in just one minute. Emily Shuckburgh is a mathematician and climate scientist and Director of Cambridge Zero. The podcast features clips from Emily Shuckburgh's talk at the Cambridge Festival in March 2021, which was hosted by the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge. You can watch the full talk here. Chris Budd OBE is a Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Bath, who works on climate models. You can read Budd's Plus article about climate modelling here.  

In this week's podcast we reach into our archive for a favourite story we first heard back in 2010! The quantum world is usually associated with the weirder end of physics, including strange phenomena like superposition or quantum entanglement, the "spooky action at a distance" as Einstein called it. But it turns out that quantum mechanical processes occur in living systems too. Some species of birds use quantum mechanics to navigate and studying how they do it might actually help us with building quantum computers. Back in 2010 we spoke to the physicists Simon Benjamin and Erik Gauger at the conference Quantum Physics and the Nature of Reality at the University of Oxford to find out more. For more information you can read our ridiculously short introduction to some basic quantum mechanics, and the accompanying article for this podcast.   

Although people often talk about the links between maths and music, if you're neither a mathematician nor a musician these links might not be that obvious. In this podcast we get to explore the connection by going on a tour of the La La Lab exhibition with curator Daniel Ramos, talk to Jürgen Richter-Gebert, who created some of the exhibits, and asked Andreas Matt about the work of Imaginary, the group that produced this exhibition. We were lucky enough to visit the La La Lab exhibition in person when it opened in September 2019 as part of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum. You might not be able to visit in person today, but you can still visit the exhibition virtually at Imaginary. You can find out more about maths and music, Fourier analysis, Fibonacci, Manjul Bhargava and the Heidelberg Laureate Forum on Plus. And you can find detailed mathematical explanations of the La La Lab exhibitions in their excellent exhibition booklet. (The image in this podcast is of the Tonnetz exhibit at the La La Lab Exhibition Image © Wanda Domínguez / Imaginary)