Maths on the Move

People don't usually think about maths and literature as related subjects, but it turns out that there are plenty of connections between the two. In this podcast we talk to mathematician Sarah Hart about her brilliant book  Once upon a time: The wondrous connections between mathematics and literature . Sarah tells us about the links between poetry and mathematical proof, the maths of Moby dick and...

"I think I'll stop here." This is how, on 23rd June 1993,  Andrew Wiles  ended his series of lectures at the  Isaac Newton Institute  (INI), our neighbour here at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences. The applause, so witnesses report, was thunderous. Wiles had just announced a proof that had eluded mathematicians for over 350 years: the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. Wiles' announcement, 30 year...

Chocolate and mayonnaise are two of our all time favourite foods, so we were very happy to get the chance to talk to  Valerie Pinfield , Professor of Engineering at Loughborough University, who has used maths to work on both chocolate and mayonnaise. We talked to Valerie at the  Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences  in Cambridge where Valerie is currently co-organising a  research prog...

You might have heard in the news recently that musician Ed Sheeran was being sued for similarities between his song Thinking out loud from 2014, and Marvin Gaye's song Get it on from 1973. But, given the way we write music to fit into specific genres, is it possible to write unique music with the limited quantity of notes and chords available? In this podcast Oli Freke, our favourite music corresp...

Did you know that we don't know what 85% of the stuff in our Universe is made of? This mysterious 85% is known as dark matter. We can't see it because it doesn't emit or reflect light, but we know it's there because it exerts a gravitational pull on stars and galaxies, and also bends the path of light. In this podcast we talk to  Blake Sherwin  about a brand new map of dark matter that has been pr...

Was the mathematical modelling projecting the course of the pandemic too pessimistic, or were the projections justified? Matt Keeling tells our colleagues Ed Hill and Laura Guzmán-Rincón from SBIDER about some of the COVID models that fed into public policy.----more---- Matt Keeling ----more----We're very pleased to host this episode of  SBIDER Presents , one of the podcasts produced by the  Zeema...

In a tank in an underground laboratory in Cambridge a little green alga is executing a powerful breaststroke. It belongs to a group of algae called volvocales and it doesn't have a brain. So how can it coordinate its tiny little "arms" to perform motions worthy of an Olympic swimmer?   Algae going through their paces.  (Movies: Kirsty Wan and Raymond E. Goldstein, for more information see this pap...

What is infinity? What is infinity plus 100? What is infinity plus infinity? Today's podcast was inspired by questions sent in by our friend Ash. To answer Ash's questions we take a trip to  our favourite hotel , and we revisit our 2012 interview with our late boss,  John D. Barrow , when we asked him –  does infinity exist?  Listen to the podcast to find out how infinity can corrupt the youth, wh...

During the pandemic we all learnt to value the work of epidemiologists, whose mathematical models are essential in giving us an idea of where an epidemic might be heading. But just as there's a wide range of infectious diseases apart from COVID, so there's also a wide range of research questions epidemiologists ask. In this podcast we talk to researchers Helena Stage and Laura Guzmán-Rincón about...

"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  Com...

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 onlin...

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 s...

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 incred...

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 Sexu...

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 the...

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 Pal...

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...

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...

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 Yur...

Professor Nataliya Vaisfel'd was until recently a mathematician at Odesa I. I. Mechnykov National University . Forced to flee Ukraine after the Russian invasion of her home country in February of this year, Nataliya has since travelled across Europe with her wheelchair-bound mother and their dogs, eventually finding sanctuary in Britain. In part this was thanks to the Solidarity for mathematicians...

Over the summer we were lucky enough to meet some young female mathematicians who were just finishing up their summer research projects with the  Philippa Fawcett Internship Programme  and the  Cambridge Mathematics Placements programme . On our way to the writing workshops we were running with these women, we walked past six inspiring portraits of female mathematicians from Cambridge. These form...

In this podcast we are very happy to revisit our 2017 interview with  Holly Krieger , one of the six Cambridge mathematicians whose portrait is included in the  Women of Mathematics  photo exhibition. Krieger works in dynamical systems theory, particularly on chaotic systems. In this interview she told us about the joys of learning and conversations with colleagues.   Holly Krieger (Photograph by ...

In this podcast we are very happy to revist our 2017 interview with  Julia Gog - Professor of Mathematical Biology and a very good friend of us here at plus.maths.org . Over the last two years we've been working closely with Gog and her colleagues at the  JUNIPER  modelling consortium, communicating their work on the mathematical front-line of the COVID-19 pandemic.   In this interview, first reco...

In this podcast we revisit our 2017 interview with Anne-Christine Davis, Professor of Theoretical Physics. Anne was the first female professor in the Maths faculty at the University of Cambridge. In this interview, first recorded to celebrate the addition of six portraits of Cambridge mathematicians to the Women of Mathematics  photo exhibition, Davis told us that over her long career she had seen...

Last week we started a special series of podcasts revisiting the   Women of Mathematics photo exhibition, which celebrates female mathematicians from institutions throughout Europe. When the University of Cambridge hosted the exhibition in 2017 , we had the opportunity to interview the six Cambridge mathematicians who's portraits appear in the exhibition about their work and their mathematical liv...