News
Latest news from the Mathematics Outreach Team.
*** to be updated soon ***
Cantor's Contest 2015
Two of our undergraduate students, Jonny Scott and Ali Raad, have designed a mathematical competition to bamboozle brains and get everyone thinking. There are even Amazon vouchers to be won!
Anyone can enter the competition, which has a deadline of Friday 27th February. To enter, take a look at the question sheet and then tell Jonny and Ali your answers via their entry form.
Good luck!
MegaMenger
In October 2014 the Mathematics Outreach Team took on their most ambitious project yet - creating a giant fractal sculpture made from 48,000 business cards. This was part of a worldwide project called MegaMenger and brought together students and lecturers alike in the pursuit of fractal beauty.
To start making a Menger sponge, take a cube, divide it into 27 smaller cubes, and then remove the middle cube of each side and the very centre. This creates a "Level 1" Menger sponge which is made out of 20 cubes. To make a "Level 2" Menger sponge, replace each of the 20 cubes in your Level 1 sponge by Level 1 sponges. Thus a Level 2 Menger sponge is made out of 20x20=400 cubes. To make a Level 3, replace each of those 400 cubes with Level 1 cubes, creating 400x20=8000 cubes. This method could theoretically be repeated an infinite number of times, creating a beautiful self-similar object that has infinite surface area but no volume.
In our MegaMenger sculpture, each individual cube is formed of 6 business cards, and the entire project took hundreds of people a week to put together. In order to stimulate interest amongst people in the School of Mathematics, the Maths Outreach Team took to online social media and introduced ‘Fractal Nominations’, where each person that made a fractal unit would nominate three of their friends to complete another fractal unit within 24 hours. Regular online posting meant that many Edinburgh students were aware of the progress made on building the giant cube. There was also a webcam so people could watch the progress from afar - and experience nail-biting tension as the Edinburgh team raced against the University of Bath to see who could finish their cube first!
The Edinburgh Maths Outreach would like to give their thanks to anyone and everyone who helped to build and promote MegaMenger, and hope that people will keep checking their Facebook page for news of their new and upcoming events! (The sculpture is still available to view outside the cafe on Level 3 of the James Clerk Maxwell Building.)
Infectious Maths
During 5-9 April we were once again in the National Museum of Scotland as part of the Edinburgh International Science Festival. This year our theme was Infectious Maths and we explored all the different aspects of viruses, the spread of disease, immunisation, and how to design medicines that work. In our drop-in exhibition visitors could build their own evil virus, manage an epidemic and test their drug delivery skills. And in our workshop called Can you keep a secret? participants explored the maths of networks, and why it is that your friends seem to have more friends than you do...
Meanwhile, there were plenty of other maths events on at the science festival this year. You could Party Hard! with Colva Roney-Dougal and hear about the maths of connections; laugh out loud at comedian Simon Pampena's take on LOL-Garithms; receive A Very Short Introduction to...Fractals by Prof Kenneth Falconer; or hear about one of maths' oldest problems in Richard Wiseman's Beginners Guide to Fermat's Last Theorem.
Mathematics for Planet Earth
2013 is the international year of Maths for Planet Earth and this topic has also been chosen as the public engagement theme of the University of Edinburgh's College of Science and Engineering. During 2013 we will be running events which showcase how mathematics can be used in research areas as diverse as climate modelling, epidemiology, managing energy resources, understanding black holes and interpreting large data sets. Find out about these events on the CSE Maths for Planet Earth website and get in touch with us if you have further ideas of events, talks or exhibitions that you would like to collaborate on together.
Botanica Mathematica
Mathematics Engagement Officer Julia Collins has teamed up once again with artist Madeleine Shepherd to create a project uniting mathematics and textiles. The goal of Botanica Mathematica is to use simple mathematical rules to create knitted or crocheted pieces which mimic the way that plant forms develop. Their accompanying blog details all of the ideas and patterns which have emerged so far, including hyperbolic chanterelles, chaotic seashell patterns, binary bonsais (see photo) and Fibonacci flowers. The project ran for the whole of 2013 to accompany the themes of Maths for Planet Earth and Year of Natural Scotland, and they still hope to encourage as many people as possible to contribute pieces for ongoing exhibitions. In April they took their project to the Mini Maker Faire at the Edinburgh International Science Festival; in September they were at the Orkney Science Festival and in October at the Midlothian Science Festival. In 2014 the project will again be on display at the Edinburgh International Science Festival as part of Science at the Heart of Things and the Botanics Late event.