By Hannah F, Year 12

On the 8th of February, the Year 12 Maths students, accompanied by Ms Critcher and Mr Lamagna, attended the Maths Fest at the Royal Institution, for a day filled with mathematical fun!

The Maths Fest was kicked off by Aofie Hunt who spoke to us about Maths in disguise, and in particular, the applications of Maths when planning big events. She explained how Maths is used to understand the movement of crowds, including the link between crowd flow and quadratic equations, and the building of simulation models to predict how long it will take a crowd to evacuate. In recent years, the Maths behind crowd planning has become even more important as social distancing began to be considered.

Next, James Grime talked to us about the Maths involved in the digital world. He described how every message we send on the internet is transmitted in binary, and the signals of these messages don’t interfere with each other due to frequency hopping which was discovered by Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr.  James then showed us how Maths is used to fix errors in transmission by using error correcting codes.

He demonstrated this by drilling a hole into a CD, and then putting it in a CD player where it played like normal. This idea is also used when transmitting messages from space. Our third speaker was Rob Eastaway who explained the Maths behind envy. One scenario he explored was how to share a biscuit between two people, so that both people think they have got at least a half. This classic problem is one that anyone with a sibling knows all too well! The solution involved person A cutting the biscuit into what they think is half, and person B choosing what they think is the bigger piece, and so at least a half. This is an unusual situation where you end up with more than a biscuit as A plus B is greater than or equal to one. Rob then went on to discuss how to share a biscuit between three or four people, which got increasingly more complicated. Who knew the Maths of biscuits required so much thought!

Another event that occurred during the day was the Maths Slam. This involved students taking the stage to present a Maths concept in under 3 minutes. There was a wide variety of intriguing entries, ranging from the Maths of maps, which was presented by NHEHS’ Anna H and Sia P, to the Sleeping Beauty problem. 

During our breaks, we also had the opportunity to visit the Maths Village.

This was a series of stalls where we could complete mini Maths activities to win prizes or talk to people who use Maths everyday at university and in industry.

All in all, the Maths Fest was a wonderful experience as it was fascinating to hear about the speakers’ favourite bits of Maths and it opened our eyes to the endless applications of Maths in everyday life.