13 year 10 and 12 students went with Ms Lowe and Ms Cruse to Bristol Beacon to see the Maths Inspiration lectures – part of a national program of interactive Maths lecture shows for teenagers. The lectures were funny, interesting, useful for sixth form Maths and definitely inspirational. There were so many ideas in all the talks for our IB students to think about for their IA coursework.

They were hosted by Matt Parker who’s known as the ‘stand up mathematician’ (you may well have seen him on YouTube doing talks and in some of the numberphile videos). The speakers were Jennifer Visser-Rogers who talked about hypothesis testing in the real world, which was incredibly useful for our A level students currently studying this topic. Tom Crawford is using Maths to save the planet, looking at how to model river and ocean currents and the Coriolis force, to work out how best to clean up the ocean. And Ben Sparks who is a lecturer at Bath University, and was both funny and fascinating, talking about when irrational numbers came into being, and looking at Complex Numbers, a topic currently being studied by our Further Maths students. Look up the Mandelbrot set, and see if you can find a picture of it on the Maths Department hub page. Ben is coming into school soon, so watch out for him!

It was a great afternoon which we will be repeating in the future.