School of Mathematics

A Night in Wonderland

On Friday 18th May a team of people from the School of Mathematics and ICMS turned into Snark Hunters at a Lewis Carroll themed night at the National Museum of Scotland. "A Night in Wonderland" was one of the RBS Museum Late events in which the public could come to see the museum's collection after hours, while dancing to live music, drinking cocktails and getting their faces painted.

The "Snark Constellation Challenge" activity was inspired in equal parts by the Lewis Carroll poem The Hunting of the Snark and by a mathematical object in graph theory called a snark. Visitors were invited to play a game which involved colouring the lines between stars in a constellation, and were challenged to colour the lines using only 3 colours. On hand to help were postgraduate Hanyi Chen (left), Maths Engagement Officer Julia Collins (middle), artist Madeleine Shepherd (right) and postdoc Jakub Marecek (behind the camera!).

For more details on this event or any of our outreach work, email Julia.Collins@ed.ac.uk.