Celebrating Women in Mathematics Day at Oxford

On the 14th of April, a group of four girls, accompanied by Miss Cooper, took part in a 'Women in maths' day at the Andrew Wiles Building in Oxford. It included a day of talks and workshops, aimed at students in Years 9,10 and 11. The first talk was given by Vicky Neale, the Whitehead lecturer at the Mathematical Institute and Balliol College. She gave a fascinating talk on the '7 things you need to know about prime numbers.' She discussed the patterns that could be found in numbers up to 100, and introduced us to some ideas about the continuation of these patterns and whether it was an infinitely long pattern. It was then followed by an interactive talk on statistics, where we learnt about how to judge the probability of an event through statistics. After having lunch in the nearby park, we were given a pack of questions where we utilised our knowledge aspects of maths outside the school curriculum, such as binary code, to answer them. The penultimate activity of the day was a workshop where we were told to make up a code for a sentence purely using 2p and 1p coins. Some teams used the direction of coins, which side was facing up and sometimes even position on the table to signify what letters the coins represented. The day concluded with a talk from Hannah Fry, a lecturer at UCL about 'The Hidden Connections'. She talked about the connections between people in environments such as work and how these connections emerged to become patterns in behaviour. These patterns ranged from a group of people walking through a small space to traffic on the M25. She also showed us how through careful analysis, these connections could be used in the solving of crime, for example, how to locate a criminal. 
Overall, it was an incredible day where we returned to London having learnt an abundance of new ideas and useful ways to apply them. 

Sarah Li