Month: May 2016

Daniel Robertz has been awarded an LMS Undergraduate Research Bursary to fund an eight week long research project pursued by Edward Kitcher (a student who has just completed his second year) over the summer. Edward will study symmetries of differential equations and will perform computational experiments using the computer algebra system Maple to find exact solutions of certain systems of partial differential equations.

A referendum will be held on 23 June to decide whether
the  United Kingdom should remain a member of the European
Union or whether the UK should leave the EU.  This decision will have important implications for the future of the UK, so there is a lot of interest in the state of public opinion about the matter.

Julian Stander, Luciana Dalla Valle, and John Eales, from CMS, and their
collaborators, have published an article about their analysis
of the Facebook pages of the various sides in the debate.

You can follow their article on Facebook or Twitter.

Next week Dr. Antonio Rago of the CMS is attending a meeting on Conformal Field Theories and Renormalization Group Flows in Dimensions d>2 at the Galileo Galilei Institute for Theoretical Physics in Florence. See here for an example of his work in this field. More details about the meeting can be found here.

If you walk into a typical mathematics or physics department you typically see on the walls many posters explaining a research topic, or an advert for a conference in some exotic location.

There are are some very professional looking posters on the walls of 3-5 Kirby place, where some of the people in the Mathematical Sciences Centre have their offices. However, many of the posters are old, and were produced by people, who have long left the University.

Spring is here, so it is time for a poster clean up! So there has been an effort, coordinated by Stephen Huggett, to update the posters in our building. The new posters are currently being printed. So soon a visitor to our building will get an up to date overview of our current research activities.

For our virtual visitors, they can look at the example below.

Typically when business leaders are asked what skills that they would like students to have, they always mention, in addition to good mathematical skills, the ability to work in teams and to communicate well.

In the second year module: Operational Research and Monte Carlo Methods,  part of the assessment involves a group project on using a package called SIMUL8. The aim of the project was to study passengers trying to buy tickets at a railway station. There were various options, such as the number of cashiers and tickets machines, and the students were asked to investigate ways to minimize the queuing time to buy a ticket. The students worked together in groups of roughly 4.

Today all the different groups made short 15 minute presentations (including 5 minutes of questions) as part of the assessment for this part of the coursework.

The module lead for this course is Dr. Malgorzata Wojtys from the Center of Mathematical Sciences at Plymouth.

The Immersive Vision Theatre (IVT) on the campus of Plymouth University can be used as a planetarium. Dr Ben King today held the final taught lecture in his module: Mathematical Methods and Applications, for second year students, in the IVT.

The course ends with a derivation of Keplers’s law from Newton’s law of gravitation. Ben showed the students a short film, showing the modern use of the law of gravitation to finding the  mysterious Dark Matter. After the film, there was a quiz on the material. At the end there was a quick tour of the Universe, ending with the cosmic background radiation.

 

Mathematics has many applications in health care. Dr Jason Hughes, from the University’s Mathematical Sciences Research Centre and Dr Miriam McMullan, Lecturer in Podiatry are collaborating on developing a new mathematical model to predict the pressure on feet.  The model could help prevent foot ulcers.

They have been awarded a grant from the University’s Institute of Health and Community Pump Priming Fund.

 

Tim Reis and Ana Paula Palacois  attended the  Astonishing Science Weekend in Butlins (Bognor) 15th-17th April of this year. They presented a popular demonstration about walking on custard.

Some very good reviews are below:

• One review of the walking on custard demonstration.
• Another good review from the Times (but you might need to register to read it)
• A review of the custard demo from the schoolrun.com .

And some pictures …