By Mrs Critcher, Maths Teacher

It was fantastic to be able to take the whole of Year 10 to a morning of Maths lectures recently for the first time in a few years. Meeting at Tottenham Court Road at 9am (well done for being so prompt and also well done to all of the parents who were so efficient at letting us know of absentees) we then had a short walk to the Phoenix theatre. Our compere, Jen Rogers, is a medical statistician and set the scene by illustrating how misleading statistics can be with an example of death rates due to Covid amongst vaccinated people.

There were three lectures:

‘The Shape of Escape’ by Aoife Hunt showed how Maths is used to answer questions such as ‘How long will it take to evacuate Glastonbury’. This resulted in us seeing how a quadratic curve can be used to model the flow of people moving in an emergency. A big shout out to Emi for volunteering to go on stage and help to demonstrate how bigger groups of people move slower than smaller groups.

‘Simply the Best’ by Paul Shepherd looked at engineering problems such as ‘What is the optimum shape for the Wembley arch’. He introduced students to cost functions and the environmental efforts being made to design structures that minimise the use of concrete in an effort to cut carbon emissions. The future could see use of 3D printers to produce skyscrapers!

‘Patterns and Predictions’ by Colin Wright introduced some surprising number patterns seen in Pascal’s Triangle, and how they can be shown through juggling up to 5 balls. This had students barely able to watch as the presenter threw many balls in the air simultaneously. Sitting right at the front enabled students to fangirl at the end and take selfies with @ColinTheMathmo.

Travelling back to school on the recently fully opened Elizabeth line made us all think about the huge amount of mathematics that must have gone into its construction.