L1

This session will take place live in L1 and online. A Teams link will be shared 30 minutes before the session begins.

This session will take place live in L1 and online. A Teams link will be shared 30 minutes before the session begins.

This session will take place live in L1 only and not online on Teams. 

Are you interested in sharing your love of Maths with the next generation of mathematicians, but you don’t know where to start? In this session we will discuss some basic principles and top tips for creating a workshop for students aged 14–16, and get you started on developing your own. There will also be the opportunity to work on this further afterwards and potentially deliver your session as part of the Oxfordshire Maths Masterclasses (for local school students) in Hilary Term. Bring along your favourite bit of maths and a willingness to have a go.

Fancy a fun afternoon on the final Friday afternoon of term? Then come along, either by yourself or pre-organised teams of up to four, to this week’s Fridays@2 for the first ever Big Mathematical Quiz of the Year!

Have you ever had to explain mathematics to someone who isn’t a mathematician? Maybe you’ve been cornered at a family gathering by an interested relative. Maybe you’d like to explain to a potential employer what you’ve been doing for the last three years. Maybe you’ve agreed to explain vector calculus to a room of 13-year-olds. We’ve all been there. This session will cover some top tips for talking about maths in a way that makes sense to non-mathematicians, with specific examples from the outreach team.

Mathematicians need to talk and write about their mathematics.  This includes undergraduates and MSc students, who may be writing a dissertation or project report, preparing a presentation on a summer research project, or preparing for a job interview.  We think that it can be helpful to think of this as a form of storytelling, as this can lead to more effective communication.  For a story to be engaging you also need to know your audience.  In this session, we'll discuss what we mean by telling a mathematical story, give you some top tips from our experience, and give you a chance to think about how you might put this into practice.

When your lecturers say that they expect you to study your notes between lectures, what do they really mean?  There is research on how mathematicians go about reading maths effectively.  We'll look at a technique (self-explanation training) that has been shown to improve students' comprehension of proofs, and in this interactive workshop we'll practise together on some examples.  Please bring a pen/pencil and paper!

Prime numbers have been looked at for centuries, but some of the most basic questions about them are still major unsolved problems. These problems began as idle curiosities, but have grown to become hugely important not only in pure mathematics, but also have many applications to the real world. I'll talk about some of these quests to find patterns in the sequence of prime numbers.

Mathematics has provided us with several extremely useful tools to apply in the world beyond mathematics.  But it also provides us with mathematicians -- individuals who have trained habits of careful thinking in domains where that is the only way to make progress. This talk will explore some other domains -- such as saying sensible things about the long-term future, or how to identify good actions in the world -- where this style of thinking seems particularly desirable as progress can otherwise be elusive or illusory.  It will also consider how a mathematician's curiosity can help to identify important questions.