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Four classes, each lasting 3 hours on Saturday mornings at the end of November and the beginning of December, were given for 40 year-9 (13 year-old) Oxfordshire school children. They were held at Queen's College. The lecturers were:

• Peter Neumann Challenges;
• Ian Tustian and David Wheeler (Warriner School, Banbury) Fill it up! --- maximisation problems
• David Acheson 1089 and all that
• Professor Sir Christopher Zeeman Gyroscopes and boomerangs.

Prof. Dominic Welsh will be a plenary speaker at the Combinatorics meeting organised by the New Zealand Institute of Mathematics and its Applications in Taupo next week.

Marcus du Sautoy is presenting Mind Games on BBC4 on Mondays at 9:00 and Wednesdays at 10:00.

Jon Chapman has spent Michaelmas 2004 at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand on a Visiting Oxford Fellowship.

Dr Eamonn O'Brien (University of Auckland) is in Oxford on a two and half week visit funded by EPSRC grant GR/S86259/01. During his visit he gave a talk to the Algebra Seminar, and has also given talks in Manchester, Canterbury & Birmingham. During his visit Eamonn O'Brien and Michael Vaughan-Lee have finalized their database of groups of order p^7. They have also settled an old problem on whether every finite p-group can be generated by a set of elements all having the same order - the answer is "No".

Prof. Frances Kirwan is currently President of the London Mathematical Society, just beginning her second year of office. Nick Woodhouse is the LMS Treasurer and Brian Stewart is the LMS Education Secretary.

Dr David Acheson gave the Alan Tayler Lecture for 2004 at St Catherine's College, Oxford. Title: 1089 and All That.

Frances Kirwan has been awarded an EPSRC Senior Research Fellowship for five years, starting at Easter 2005. (The EPSRC usually awards three such fellowships each year in engineering and the physical sciences). She will be working on a research project in algebraic geometry, studying moduli spaces of complex algebraic curves.

Roger Penrose was given an honorary degree by the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) on 2 October 2004.

Roger Penrose received the (first) Amaldi Prize by the Italian Society for Relativity and Gravitation on 13 Sept, 2004