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Professor Jeff Forshaw of the University of Manchester has won the 2013 Kelvin medal and prize awarded by the Institute of Physics. The medal is for Prof. Forshaw’s wide-reaching work aimed at helping the general public to understand complex ideas in physics. |
Prof. Forshaw has written two popular science books; “The quantum universe” and “Why does E=mc^2”, both with Brian Cox.
Links
2013 Kelvin medal and prize, IOP website
Jeff Forshaw’s homepage
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Pupils in half of Wales’ secondary schools and 40% of primary schools have weak numeracy skills, according to Estyn (Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education and Training in Wales). |
Calculators at the ready!
Estyn state that pupils rely on calculators to do basic arithmetic and so struggle to do harder calculations.
In my experience teaching foundation year students at university level this phenomena is by no means restricted to Welsh, or even British students. Too often pupils reach for the calculator and do not understand the calculation required.
For instance, on more than one occasion have I had a student “call me out” saying that my numerical answer is wrong as it does not agree with their calculator. They can struggle with the fact that they have simply entered the numbers in wrong! This is usually a problem with doing longer calculations in one step and placing brackets in the wrong place.
This has happened when doing physics based questions where we can use our physical intuition to dismiss the incorrect answers. For example, the classical electron radius cannot be of the order 1cm, no matter what your calculator says!
Hey, but I can read good!
We know that many schools have not given as much attention to numeracy as they have done for literacy, but it is vital that schools have clear plans for developing numeracy skills.
Chief inspector Ann Keane
There seems to be a strange situation in the UK where by it is okay to be innumerate, but to be literate is shameful.
Can you imagine ever at a party saying “I wrote a book” only to get the response “I cannot read”? It happens if you tell people you are interested in mathematics!
Well, to read and write are essential life skills, so why not basic mathematics?
Hopefully the state of mind of the country on this issue will change. We now hope that the Welsh government will act on this report and find ways to engage pupils to help develop their mathematics skills.
The report
Numeracy in key stages 2 and 3: a baseline study (opens pdf)
Link
Numeracy: Pupils struggle with sums in Wales says Estyn (BBC News)
The London Mathematical Society has a webpage in which they “take a look at some of the people who’ve made major contributions in the world of mathematics”. Indeed, it is always nice to put a face to the names we read about. My only comment about the page is that I do not think all the information is up to date, but never mind.
Link
Faces of Mathematics, London Mathematical Society
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The Newton lecture 2012 is now available to watch on the IOP website. Professor Martin Rees, the winner of the 2012 Newton medal, gave the lecture entitled Form Mars to the multiverse. |
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This month marks the 60th anniversary of the discovery of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA to most of us. In the USA, there is DNA Day, which is a holiday celebrated on the 25th of April. The holiday commemorates the day in 1953 when James Watson and Francis Crick published their paper in Nature on the structure of DNA. It is also the 10th anniversary of the first sequencing of the human genome. |
Knot theory
One area of mathematics that has been rather useful in the study of DNA, and in particular how it tangles is knot theory. DNA is tightly packed into genes and chromosomes. This packing can be thought of as two very long strands that have been intertwined many times and tied into knots. Before the DNA can replicate it needs to be arranged much neater than that and so needs to be unpacked. Thus knot theory is important in understanding this “unknotting” of DNA.
The way the knots were classified had nothing to do with biology, but now you can calculate the things important to you.
Nicholas Cozzarelli, in [1].
A knot is just a embedding of a circle in 3d.
The knot diagram of the Trefoil knot
The classification of knots has been a harder problem that one might expect. The general idea is to construct ways to see if two knots are equivalent, meaning they are the same knot. More mathematically two knots are equivalent if they can be transformed into each other via a special kind of transformation known as an ambient isotopy. Such transformations are really just “distortions” of the knot without any cutting.
A powerful way of deciding of knots are the same or not, is to calculate their Jones polynomial [2]. Interestingly, there is a relation between the Jones Polynomial and Chern-Simons gauge theory, which was first discovered by Witten [3].
References
[1] David Austin, That Knotty DNA, Feature Column of the AMS.
[2] Jones, V.F.R. (1985),A polynomial invariant for knots via von Neumann algebra, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc.(N.S.) 12: 103–111
[3]Edward Witten, Quantum field theory and the Jones polynomial, Comm. Math. Phys. Volume 121, Number 3 (1989), 351-399
On 19th March 2013, Sir Richard Sykes, Chairman of the Royal Institution (Ri) announced that the Ri has received a donation of £4.4 million. The announcement was made at a special general meeting for the Institution’s members. The donation was made by a foundation which will remain anonymous at this stage.
The Royal Institution of Great Britain, by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, circa 1838
In January, the Ri said it was considering selling 21 Albemarle Street London home in order to ease it’s financial troubles. This £4.4 million gift will help give the RI some time in order to sort out their finances.
This donation is very timely and will clear the Ri’s bank debt, as well as giving us the breathing room to explore other options more fully. However, our financial issues are far from being resolved.
Sir Richard Sykes
About the Ri
The Royal Institution (Ri) is an independent charity dedicated to connecting people with the world of science. They are most famous for the Christmas Lectures which were started by Michael Faraday in 1825. The Christmas Lectures have been broadcast on television since 1966 and in 2011 the combined broadcast reached over 4 million viewers.
Lithograph of Michael Faraday delivering a Christmas lecture at the Royal Institution, by Alexander Blaikley circa 1856
The Lab in a Lorry will be touring around Wales in April and June 2013. Follow the link below for more details
Lab in a Lorry is an interactive mobile science laboratory staffed by practising scientists and engineers.
The aim of Lab in a Lorry is to give young people aged 11-14 the opportunity to do experimental science in the way it actually happens; exploratory, accidental, informed by curiosity and intuition, but also bounded and guided by the experience and insight of practicing scientists.
http://www.labinalorry.org.uk/about_lab_in_a_lorry.cfm
Looking for volunteers
James Bamford, Senior Operations Coordinator – Lab in a Lorry, has made a call for volunteers to help run the events. A poster for the call can be found here (opens pdf).
Link
Lab in a Lorry
Prof. Martin Rees, winner of the 2012 Isaac Newton medal for his “outstanding contributions to relativistic astrophysics and cosmology”, has given an interview for the Institute of Physics. Follow the link below to watch the video.
14th March has been officially designated Pi Day, a day for which we can celebrate the glorious number that starts with 3.14. Coincidentally, the 14th of March is also Albert Einstein’s birthday.
\(\pi\) -the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter- has been calculated to over one trillion decimal places. The record as far as I know belongs to Alexander J. Yee & Shigeru Kondo, who have calculated \(\pi\) to 10 trillion digits [1]. As an irrational and transcendental number, \(\pi\) will continue infinitely without any repetition or patterns emerging.
 The “pi man” Larry Shaw |
The first Pi Day was organized by Larry Shaw and held in San Francisco in 1988. In 2009, the US House of Representatives backed its official designation. |
What to do for Pi Day?
Suggestions include bake a pie for Pi Day, or be artistic and write a piece of music, a poem or make a painting. You can find lots more suggestions by following this link.
The Welsh connection
The earliest known use of the symbol \(\pi\) to represent the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is by Welsh mathematician William Jones FRS (1675 – 3 July 1749) in 1706 [2].
Portrait of William Jones by William Hogarth, 1740 (National Portrait Gallery)
Jones was a close friend of Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Edmund Halley. In November 1711 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society, and was later its Vice-President.
References
[1] Alexander J. Yee & Shigeru Kondo, Round 2… 10 Trillion Digits of Pi 2013.
[2] William Jones, Synopsis Palmariorum Matheseos, 1706.
Links
Pi Day
