Mathematics Today October: University Liaison Officer's Report

Keeping in touch

The nature of university life means that the undergraduate students I engage with are only likely to be around for a limited period of time. This engagement is usually though either a student run society or through a student member of a staff/student liaison committee. The end of one academic year and transition to the next is a potentially dangerous time for this engagement with students leaving their role within the department or society or even graduating and leaving the university altogether. I have spent some time at the end of the academic year trying to maintain contact with the students and societies I have had a relationship with, making contact with the next years students where possible. By the end of the last academic year I was in contact with student representatives or societies at 20 universities. If I lose contact with these I will start academic year 2009/10 back at square one in terms of student engagement and this is a large risk in the University Liaison role. On the staff side I hope the situation will be more stable. There are changes in staffing and staff roles though these are found in a much smaller number of cases.

At the time of writing I have made contact with next years students at 14 of the 20 universities I was in contact with last year and I consider this to be a good rate of return. My best information suggests there are 72 universities in the UK offering mathematics. I enter the new academic year with a prior relationship with a staff or student contact (or both) at 50 of them.

My thoughts now turn to planning my activities for the 2009/10 academic year. As in the previous academic year I will travel around the country offering my talk on careers for mathematicians and recreational mathematics lectures on various topics. I will also continue to operate on behalf of the IMA at careers fairs and postgraduate research conferences. In the last academic year I have visited 33 university mathematics departments and given talks and/or operated stalls at 23 of these. I am keen to increase these numbers next academic year! If you want to approach me with such an opportunity I would be very pleased to hear from you. I am also very interested to make contact with the 22 'missing' universities so if you think I haven't been in contact with your university please get in touch. You can email me on peter.rowlett@ima.org.uk. Another area where your university and the IMA can work together is University Liaison Grants to support student mathematical activities and there is more on this in the Student Section.

Activities July-August 2009

This period is the summer downtime and I used the opportunity to take much of my annual leave. Consequently my activities were lighter than usual in this period.

I attended the 3rd European Postgraduate Fluid Dynamics Conference at the University of Nottingham. This conference organised by and for postgraduate students was supported by an IMA Small Grant and I attended with a stall during the poster session and closing lunch. I believe the organisers are preparing a separate report on this conference. The materials on my stall included the Institute's new Initial Professional Development (IPD) leaflet which explains to younger members what to do to start on the path to the Chartered designations. I travelled to Brighton for a visit to the School of Computing, Mathematical and Information Sciences at the University of Brighton and to attend a ceremony at that university in which IMA Prizes were awarded to two graduands. Finally I attended an Open University summer school on mathematical modelling and gave a version of my careers talk.

Where I've been and what I did there

Little bit of a dry post but as I am fascinated by keeping track of such things, here is a list of universities I have visited so far as University Liaison Officer for the IMA (since I started in January 2008) and what I did there:

Aberdeen (Visited, Careers talk), Bath (Visited), Birmingham (Visited), Brighton (Visited, Prize Giving), Bristol (Visited, Careers talk), Brunel (Visited, Careers talk (twice)), Cambridge (Visited, Research conference stall), Cardiff (Visited, Careers talk), Edinburgh (Visited, Careers talk (twice)), Glasgow (Visited, Careers talk), Greenwich (Visited, Careers talk, Wii talk), Heriot-Watt (Visited, Careers talk), Imperial College (Visited), King's College London (Visited, Prize Giving), Kingston (Visited), Leeds (Visited), Leicester (Visited, Careers talk, Wii talk), London Met (Visited, Careers talk), Manchester (Visited, Careers fair, Research conference stall), Napier (Visited, Branch talk), Newcastle (Visited, Wii talk, Cryptography talk), Nottingham (Visited, Research conference stall), Nottingham Trent (Visited, Careers talk), OU (Visited, Careers talk), Oxford (Visited, Careers fair), Plymouth (Visited, Careers fair), Portsmouth (Visited), Reading (Visited), Sheffield (Visited, Wii talk), St Andrews (Visited, Careers talk), Strathclyde (Visited, Careers talk), Surrey (Visited, Research conference stall), UCL (Visited), UWE (Visited, Careers talk), Warwick (Visited) and York (Visited, Careers talk (twice), Careers fair, Puzzles talk).

Visited refers to any visit. Otherwise, details of talks I have given are available.

I believe the following universities offer mathematics but I have not yet been there as ULO:

Aberystwyth, Aston, Birkbeck, Bolton, Chester, City, London, Coventry, Derby, Dundee, Durham, Essex, Exeter, Glamorgan, Hertfordshire, Keele, Kent, Lancaster, Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores, Loughborough, LSE, Manchester Metropolitan, Northampton, Northumbria at Newcastle, Oxford Brookes, Queen Mary London, Queen's, Belfast, Royal Holloway, Sheffield Hallam, Southampton, Staffordshire, Stirling, Sussex, Swansea, UCLAN, UEA, West of Scotland and Wolverhampton.

Podcast: Episode 39 - Beatrice Pelloni, Applications of Fourier transforms

These are the show notes for episode 39 of the Travels in a Mathematical World Podcast. 39 is the smallest number whose sum of digits is larger than that of its square. More about 39 from Number Gossip.

The podcast resumes from the summer break and we hear from Beatrice Pelloni, Reader in Applied Mathematics at University of Reading, who I met at the Women in Mathematics Day 2009 and who spoke to me about her career, the topic of her talk at that event ("Generalised Fourier transforms and boundary value problems") and a little about being both a mother to young children and a mathematician.

If you are interested to learn more you can get some basics on Fourier transforms from Wolfram Mathworld. (Having brushed up, you might find this cartoon from xkcd amusing: "Fourier"). Boundary value problems are a broad topic; a definition of "Boundary Value Problem" can be found at Wolfram MathWorld and lots of reference material can be found online or in your university library. If you're really serious, you can read a paper by Beatrice on "Linear and nonlinear generalized Fourier transforms" and there are several papers on boundary value problems on Beatrice's website.

If you are interested in learning more about the contribution of women to mathematics you might be interested to learn related issues are explored in the latest iSquared, which is a special issue on "Women in Maths".

You can find out more about my work with the IMA by following me on Twitter, reading this blog and visiting http://www.ima.org.uk/student/. Join the Facebook page.

Advice for new PGCE mathematics student

Recently I offered some advice to an incoming PGCE secondary mathematics student - someone just starting out but who needs to (a) complete the PGCE and (b) be employable a year from now. I'd like to say "Recently I was asked for" but it was totally unsolicited rambling - but happily gratefully received. Anyway, here it is:

• Do you read Nrich? You should. Also Plus, iSquared.
• Have you joined the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics (NCETM) portal/mailing list? You should.
• The IMA has recently launched a Chartered Status for maths teachers – CMathTeach – which you may like to be aware of.
• You could also think about volunteering to help out with local Royal Institution mathematics masterclasses, which are apparently a lot of fun and I imagine a good way to show you are beyond the average PGCE graduate.

I suppose I should have added join Twitter. Any other advice?

You may also like...

I have been listening to music through Spotify, the ad-supported streaming music service. On the application home page this recommends "Artists you may like". This morning I turned on and it had a fairly eclectic mix - Motörhead, Marilyn Manson, Faster Pussycat, Pantera,... Wham! and George Michael. I presume this 'personalised' list is based on what I have been listening to - so what have I been listening to?! I think I listened to a Rage Against the Machine album a few weeks ago but I've certainly not been listening to any 80s disco pop. Usually I have noticed this list filled with 50s rock. I think that one of the first artists I searched for on Spotify was Buddy Holly and, although I don't listen to a lot from that era I presumed the "Artists you may like" algorithm was relying too much on initial conditions. When I think about yesterday I seem to remember listening to a lot of Blur. So we have a glimpse at the algorithm:

1950s rock 'n' roll + Blur = Marilyn Manson and Wham!

Not convinced, hmm? It does make me wonder how these algorithms work. I know Amazon does a similar process when you buy something: "People who bought the items in your basket also bought". This, it seems to me, often offers items very similar to the one I have bought. For example, "Customers who bought this monitor also bought these other three monitors", i.e. "Customers who bought this device also bought this other device which performs exactly the same function". Amazon also has a "customers who looked at this item also looked at" which is very useful and often points to competing devices, but once you have chosen one it seems to me Amazon should be trying to tempt you with different products not ones that solve the same problem as the one you have just bought. I suppose some people may purchase lots of similar equipment for, say, a company but I would say it is unlikely that the average user, having bought one device, would want to buy another that performs the same function (particularly before the first one has arrived).

In this forum post, user Oscar Rylin suggests the "Artists you may like" is based on what people who listen to what you listen to also listen to. So it may be that the raw data - user behaviour - is erratic and the predictions are in turn. Still, there are 6 slots for artists I may like and four are metal and two are disco. It seems if it couldn't make its mind up reliably all the slots should be likely to be distinct from each other as well as from my listening history. Also on that forum post is some suggestion that Spotify is just advertising arbitrarily. However it is in Spotify's interest to get you discovering music you like so that you keep listening for longer and hear more adverts. So making poor or irrelevant suggestions is bad for business.

This business of better algorithm design is a fairly hot topic these days with Web 2.0 user generated content. I remember that in the podcast episode 28 I pointed to an article in the Guardian, "Go figure ... why mathematicians rule the internet," on such algorithms. I know Chris Budd will tell you this sort of problem is the boom area of applied mathematics in the 21st Century, and did so in podcast episode 26.

So I have a blog (redux)

Back in the first post on this blog, I suggested the purpose of this blog is to "keep track of where I go and highlight any interesting tidbits I pick up along the way". As time has gone on my use of the blog has expanded to include aspects of my other work, in maths education.

Basically I do two activities:

• For the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, and just for fun, I work in maths promotion or popular mathematics and also maths careers. I try to get people interested in maths and where it could take them. This activity includes the Travels in a Mathematical World podcast.
  
• For my PhD (currently suspended), part time lecturing at Nottingham Trent University and my employment with the University of Nottingham I work in mathematics teaching and learning and particularly teaching & learning mathematics with technology.

It seems to me that there is likely to be an audience who are interested in both but equally there are likely to be people interested in one or the other. I have generally tried to keep the education stuff off this blog but haven't always been able to resist. Just recently my job title at Nottingham was improved to the slightly buzzwordy "Technology Enhanced Learning Officer".

So I have now decided a schism is in order. I have created a seperate blog, "Adventures in Technology Enhanced Learning" to hold the education stuff. This blog, Travels in a Mathematical World, will relate to my activities:

• As University Liaison Officer for the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications;
• Volunteering as a Committee member of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications East Midlands Branch;
• Volunteering as a Council member of the British Society for the History of Mathematics (BSHM) (I was recently co-opted to BSHM Council; Oh, didn't I say?);
• Any other bits of mathematical interest that take my fancy, professionally or personally.
  

I have also recently updated my website peterrowlett.net to be a portal to everything I do online.

This blog post is written as a companion to the post on Adventures in Technology Enhanced Learning, "So I have another blog".