Education and Public Engagement Interests:
I have a passionate interest in promoting mathematics to the
general public, especially to young people. I love giving
talks about maths to any audience and have appeared at many science festivals including
New Scientist Live (above) and the Heidelberg Luareate Forum.
Please get in touch
if you would like me to give you a talk.
I am happy to give FREE talks to all ages on many subjects related
to the importance and relevance of mathematics to real life.
For examples of talks see
my 24 Gresham lectures on the theme of 'Maths and the making
of the modern world' (which will be coming out as a series of books) and also
fun presentations for the general public .
More details of
my activites in maths education and public engagement are given below
- Director of the
Bath Taps
Into Science Festival . The 2009 event won the
British Science Association award
for the best science festival during National Science and Engineering Week.
If you want to have a look at Bath Taps in action here is a video .
-
SIAM Education Committee
- Co-author of the
Vorderman Report on the current state
and future of Maths Education in the UK
- Director of the Bath series of Royal Institution Mathematics Masterclasses .
My book .Mathematics
Galore co-authored with Chris Sangwin,
is a collection of these classes. See the
review
in Plus Maths.
- I am the former chair, and now serve on the Risk and Compliance Committee of the United Kingdom Maths Trust (UKMT) which coordinates maths competitions across the UK. The
UKMT works with 80% of the schools in the UK, and over 700,000 young people per year take part in its activities.
- I was the Vice-President for the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA)
responsible for Communications and Outreach and also for the 50th Birthday celebrations in 2014. As part of this
I co-edited the book '50 Visions of Mathematics' which has 50 popular maths articles and 50 images of maths. It
also has various proofs of Pythagoras' Theorem in different literary styles. (I was the C in Sam Parc)
- I contribute to the IMA
Maths Matters series of short, punchy, articles on the impact of mathematics, and also to the
IMA Maths Careers website.
- In 2010 I was director of the exhibit in the
Royal Society Summer Exhibition called
which gave a hands on experience of the
way that maths helps us understand the complexities in the world,
from weather forecasting and chaos to energy harvesting and from bouncing balls
and sand to flocks and crowds.
If you are mad enough to want to run
such an exhibition yourself then
have a look at the user guide
A user guide to running a Royal Society Summer Exhibition.