Do you know the difference between a reef knot and a granny knot? And how can you tell a taut-line hitch from a sheet bend? In this session, we'll explore how you can use ordinary high-school algebra to learn about knots. Which then has all sorts of real-life applications from sailing and putting up a tent, to detangling strands of DNA or indeed those pesky Christmas lights. (Don't worry, no knowledge of actually tying knots is assumed!).
Codes have been an important feature of civilisation for almost as long as there has been civilisation. In the last 100 years, work on the relationship between Maths and coding has helped shorten the Second World War by as much as two years, helped in the development of the internet, and keeps trillions of pounds' worth of financial transactions secure on a daily basis. We'll explore this relationship, discussing some of the Maths behind modern codes.
| 25th October 2025 | | Linear Programming - Dr David Lewis Fitting Circles into Triangles - Dr Colin Wright |
| 26th April 2025 | | Life, Death & Cellular Automata - Dr Ellis Rintoul The Algebraic Pentagon - Dr Colin Wright |
| 29th March 2025 | | Numbers Don't Lie - Or Do They? - Dr Andreas Alpers Maths and Democracy - Prof Anna Pratoussevitch |
| 22nd February 2025 | | Reflections on a Laser Beam - Prof Rodi Herzberg Continued Fractions - Dr Alena Haddley |
| 25th January 2025 | | Title TBC - Dr Maksymilian J Roman Title TBC - Mr Samuel Canham |
| 30th November 2024 | | Simple Additive Number Theory - Dr David Lewis A Fool's Guide to Fool-proofing Proofs - Dr Sam Tickle |
| 26th October 2024 | | White Dwarfs: Dark Matter Detectors in Space - Dr Juri Smirnov Cryptography, Starting Where Others Finish - Dr Colin Wright |
| 27th April 2024 | | Is Time Travel Possible? - Dr Susha Parameswaran Places, Limits and Being Short-Sighted - Dr Colin Wright |
| 23rd March 2024 | | Step into the Fourth Dimension - Ms Julia Munch The Thin Line Between the Computationally Tractable and Intractable - Dr Andreas Alpers |
| 24th February 2024 | | How a Recreational Maths Problem From 1747 Became Important for Modern Computing - Prof Rodi Herzberg Ready, SET, Go! - Prof Anna Pratoussevitch |
| 27th January 2024 | | Populations and Chaos - Dr Graham Reeve Title TBC - Dr Colin Wright |
| 25th November 2023 | | Are You One in a Million? - Mr Jorge Romero You Have the Right to Remain Unsure - Dr Sam Tickle |
| 28th October 2023 | | Cutting and Slicing in the Kitchen - Dr David Lewis Time Travel Briefing #17 - Dr Colin Wright |
| 22nd April 2023 | | The (Quasi)crystal Clear World of Penrose Patterns - Dr Ellis Rintoul The Mutilated Chessboard - Dr Colin Wright |
| 25th March 2023 | | Geometric Structures in Materials: What Does Nature Optimise? - Dr Andreas Alpers How to Solve the Unsolvable - Dr Sam Tickle |
| 25th February 2023 | | Coxeter Number Friezes - Dr Robin McLean Triangle Plots Here, There and Everywhere - Professor Anna Pratoussevitch |
| 28th January 2023 | | Using Graphs When Modelling Real-Life Situations - Mrs Sue Harkness Who Would Be a Human Computer? - Dr Ian Thompson |
| 26th November 2022 | | Ding-dong Merrily on High - Ringing the Changes the Scientific Way - Professor Helen Aspinall What Really Matters - Dr Oliver Fischer |
| 29th October 2022 | | Some Basics of the Finite Differencing Method Used in Weather Forecasting - Dr David Lewis From Doodles to Dollars - Dr Colin Wright |
| 23rd April 2022 | | Prepare For Trouble! And Make It Dobble! - The Plane Simple Maths Behind Dobble - Dr Ellis Rintoul Maths in a Twist - Dr Colin Wright |
| 26th March 2022 | | Tomography, Sudokus, the Beatles, and a Centuries-Old Problem in Number Theory - Dr Andreas Alpers How Far The Moon? - Dr Colin Wright |
| 26th February 2022 | | Be a Winner - Optimal Strategies in Games - Professor Rodi Herzberg Gini's Tree Wishes: Random Forests and Why They Are (Very) Useful - Dr Sam Tickle |
| 29th January 2022 | | Recurrence Relations and the Fibonacci Numbers - Alessio Kandiah & Postgraduate Outreach Group Count Like An Egyptian - Dr Anna Pratoussevitch |
| 27th November 2021 | | Investing in Your Future - Rhys Wells Science is Cool - Sarah Annand |
| 30th October 2021 | | Multiplication of Numbers in Different Bases to a High Degree of Precision - Dr David Lewis An Elevator Pitch for Group Theory - Dr Colin Wright |
| 24th April 2021 | | Zoom Maths Club - Using Mathematics to Put Humans on Mars (or not) - Dr Ian Thompson Zoom Maths Club - Numbers and Recurrent Relations - Dr Oleg Karpenkov |
| 27th March 2021 | | Zoom Maths Club - It *IS* Only Rocket Science! - Jorge Romero |
| 27th February 2021 | | Zoom Maths Club - Reflections on a Laser Beam - Professor Rodi Herzberg Zoom Maths Club - Spot the Difference - Dr Graham Reeve |
| 30th January 2021 | | Zoom Maths Club - So Your Treatment Doesn't Work: How to Lie with Statistics - Dr Mary Fortune Zoom Maths Club - Of Dice and Gen(eration) of Random Numbers - Dr Sam Tickle |
| 28th November 2020 | | Zoom Maths Club - Ding-dong Merrily on High - Ringing the Changes the Scientific Way - Professor Helen Aspinall Zoom Maths Club - ChrisMATHS Dragon Quiz - Mr Chris Marchant & Maths Outreach Team |
| 31st October 2020 | | Zoom Maths Club - Areas of Polygons and Applications - Professor Peter Giblin OBE Zoom Maths Club - The Weird and Wonderful World of the Infinite - Dr David Lewis |
| 26th September 2020 | | Zoom Maths Club - Pythagorean Tuning and Equal Temperament - Mr Damian Haigh Zoom Maths Club - Am I Positive? - Mr Niall Thompson |
| 29th February 2020 | | Quantum Cryptography - Professor Kurt Langfeld Extinction Recalculation - Predicting the Future using Branching Processes - Dr Sam Tickle |
| 25th January 2020 | | A Mathematician's Journey into the Marvellous World of Microscopic Swimmers & Crawlers - Professor Rachel Bearon Brussels Sprouts - Dr Joel Haddley |
| 30th November 2019 | | Counting Functions - Professor Peter Giblin OBE Decision Trees - Sue Harkness |
| 26th October 2019 | | Binary Arithmetic - Counting in Ones - Dr Robin McLean Complex Numbers for Fun and Profit - Dr Colin Wright |
| 28th September 2019 | | Fake Paradoxes - Dr Oleg Karpenkov Science is Cool - Sarah Annand |
| 27th April 2019 | | Water Measuring, Skew Billiards and Euclid's Algorithm - Dr David Lewis Cryptography, Starting Where Others Finish - Dr Colin Wright |
| 30th March 2019 | | Graph Theory - Dr Oleg Karpenkov Fractals - Barry Grantham |
| 23rd February 2019 | | Fibonacci Representations - Professor Peter Giblin OBE Paradoxes in Statistics and Probability - Dr Alexei Piunovskiy |
| 26th January 2019 | | Playing with Positive Polynomials - Dr Robin McLean Moebius: Beyond the Strip - Dr Joel Haddley |
| 24th November 2018 | | Untangle the Tangle - Dr Anna Pratoussevitch What's in a Number? - Dr Ian Thompson |
| 27th October 2018 | | Reading Between the Lies: Maths vs Fake News - Sam Tickle Taking Square Roots in a New Direction - Dr Colin Wright |
| 29th September 2018 | | Counting with Catalan - Professor Peter Giblin OBE Continued Fractions - Dr Alena Haddley |
| 21st April 2018 | | Linear Programming - Dr David Lewis Real Analysis via Puzzles - Dr Colin Wright |
| 24th March 2018 | | TBC - Dr Daniel Colquitt Mathematics of Infinity - Dr Alexei Piunovskiy |
| 24th February 2018 | | Sequences - Dr Graham Reeve Markov My Words - Sam Tickle |
| 27th January 2018 | | Integer Calculus - Dr Joel Haddley Finite Arithmetic and Latin Squares - Dr Robin McLean |
| 25th November 2017 | | Ding-dong Merrily on High - Ringing the Changes the Scientific Way - Professor Helen Aspinall Modelling Ferris Wheels - Sue Harkness |
| 28th October 2017 | | Invariants - Dr Oleg Karpenkov Tackling an Impossible Problem - Dr Colin Wright |
| 30th September 2017 | | So Your Treatment Doesn't Work: How to Lie with Statistics - Dr Mary Fortune Remainders, Consecutive Whole Numbers and Card Surprises - Professor Peter Giblin |
| 22nd April 2017 | | The Logistic Equation and Chaos - David Lewis TBC - Colin Wright |
| 25th March 2017 | | Paradoxical Paradoxes - Daniel Colquitt Continued Fractions - Barry Grantham |
| 25th February 2017 | | Dungeon Master's Dice (and other probability problems) - Ian Thompson The Seven Bridges of Konigsberg and other Networks - Lonnie Readioff |
| 28th January 2017 | | Magic Rectangles - Joel Haddley Needle in the World Wide Haystack - Anna Pratoussevitch |
| 26th November 2016 | | Modelling with Mathematics - Sue Harkness Simple Additive Number Theory - David Lewis |
| 29th October 2016 | | How Symmetrical is Your Cuboid? - Robin McLean Necessary vs Sufficient - Colin Wright |
| 1st October 2016 | | Cookies - Peter Giblin A Hard Sell? - Sam Tickle |
| 30th April 2016 | | Problems on Minimal Distances - Oleg Karpenkov Paradoxes in Statistics and Probability - Alexei Piunovskiy |
| 19th March 2016 | | Coxeter Number Friezes - Robin McLean |
| 27th February 2016 | | The Quickest Path to an A* - MATH291 students Playing with Permutations - MATH291 students |
| 30th January 2016 | | Gray Coding - Joel Haddley How to Make Perfect Toast and Become Infinitely Wealthy - Sam Tickle |
| 28th November 2015 | | Conjugate Numbers, Irrational Numbers and Pell's Equation - Peter Giblin |
| 31st October 2015 | | Who is the Greatest? Definition Problems in Mathematics and Elsewhere - Ian Thompson Understanding functions through curve sketching - Mark Holland |
| 19th September 2015 | | Ready, SET, Go! - Anna Pratoussevitch |
| 25th April 2015 | | Strategies for Solitaire - David Bedford TBC - TBC |
| 28th March 2015 | | The (Five) Most Beautiful Minds - Sam Tickle |
| 28th February 2015 | | Binary Arithmetic - Counting in Ones - Robin McLean Iteration and Geometric Fractals - Alex Gheorghiu |
| 31st January 2015 | | Maths's Greatest Unsolved Puzzles - Katie Steckles |
| 29th November 2014 | | Completing Magic Squares - Peter Giblin |
| 25th October 2014 | | Water Measuring, Skew Billiards and Euclid's Algorithm - David Lewis Fun with Finite Sets - Joel Haddley |
| 20th September 2014 | | Coding Theory - Eloise Hattersley Bayes' Theorem and Conditional Probability in the Real World - Mary Fortune |
| 26th April 2014 | | TBC - Rachel Bearon TBC - Colin Wright |
| 29th March 2014 | | How to Make Natural Numbers - Steve Feller It's About Time - Sam Tickle |
| 22nd February 2014 | | Building Trees and Crossing Rivers - Search in Artificial Intelligence - Katie Atkinson Modelling Decay - Lonnie Readioff |
| 25th January 2014 | | Modelling Ferris Wheels - Sue Harkness From Coin Tossings to Combinations - Mark Holland |
| 30th November 2013 | | An Introduction to Vector Fields (or "How to Comb a Coconut") - Joel Haddley Reasoning Under Uncertainty: An Introduction to Probability Theory - Ben Pace |
| 26th October 2013 | | Counting - Peter Giblin Maths with a Twist - Colin Wright |
| 21st September 2013 | | The Logistic Equation and Chaos - David Lewis Logic: The Age of Reasoning - Iain Carson |
| 27th April 2013 | | Getting Lost in 2000 Dimensions - Colin Wright Who Is Afraid Of Large Numbers? - Radu Tatar |
| 23rd March 2013 | | Recurrence Relations - Yyanis Johnson-Llambias The Seven Bridges of Konigsberg and other Networks - Lonnie Readioff |
| 23rd February 2013 | | How to Multiply - Elliott Tjia Exploration of Curves - Robert Jones and Miriam Stevens |
| 26th January 2013 | | How to play Liar's Poker - David Lewis A Plausible Approach Towards Statistical Process Control - Ken McKelvie |
| 24th November 2012 | | Reciprocal Prime Magic Squares - Joel Haddley Sums of Squares - Peter Giblin |
| 27th October 2012 | | Communication of Mathematics - Stephanie Burton Complexity Theory, P vs NP, Graph 3 Colouring, and the Million Dollar Prize - Colin Wright |
| 29th September 2012 | | To Infinity and Beyond - Adam Casey Chessboards - Mary Fortune |
| 31st March 2012 | | 'QI' Maths and Geometric Means - Ken McKelvie |
| 26th November 2011 | | Multiplication Tables - Peter Giblin |
| 29th January 2011 | | Duads, Synthemes and Totals - Ian Porteous |
| 27th November 2010 | | Graphs, Trees and Brussels Sprouts - Peter Giblin Exploration of digit patterns in outcomes of selected calculations
- Ken McKelvie |
| 27th March 2010 | | Stepping Stones to Streetwise Statistics - Ken McKelvie |
| 24th November 2007 | | Counting - Peter Giblin |
| 22nd September 2007 | | Matrices with MAPLE - David Lewis Interesting Paper-Folding Diversions - Mary Fortune and Jon Tims |
| 24th February 2007 | | The Seven Bridges of Konigsberg and other Networks - Lonnie Readioff |
| 27th January 2007 | | Evaluation of new FunMaths Roadshow material - Ken McKelvie |
| 28th October 2006 | | Universal Cycles - Peter Giblin, with assistance from Chris Marchant |
| 29th April 2006 | | Matrices - Jon Tims |
| 26th November 2005 | | Expected Values - Ken McKelvie |
| 24th September 2005 | | Probability and The Law - Grahame Settle |
| 26th February 2005 | | Ringing the Changes - Martin Bright |
| 29th January 2005 | | Transforming Spaces, Transforming Shapes - Ken McKelvie |
| 30th October 2004 | | Astounding Wonders of Indian Mathematics - Satish Malik |
| 28th February 2004 | | Circular Motion and the Cardioid - Ian Porteous |
| 31st January 2004 | | Stages in Problem Solving - What to do when stuck! - It's not what you do, it's the way that you do it... - Ken McKelvie |
| 29th November 2003 | | Some Mathematical Puzzles - David Lewis Challenging Problems from Moscow III - Vladimir Zakalyukin |
| 1st November 2003 | | The Weird and Wonderful World of the Infinite - David Lewis |
| 26th April 2003 | | Latin Squares and Groups - Shaine Bushell Perennial Primes - Asoke Nandi |
| 29th March 2003 | | An Introduction to Curve Sketching - Mark Holland Codes - Chris Sawer |
| 22nd February 2003 | | Magic Squares of Order 4 - Ian Porteous Arithmetic and Geometric Progressions - Satish Malik |
| 25th January 2003 | | The Modulus Function and some applications - David Lewis Seeing is Believing - Ken McKelvie |
| 23rd November 2002 | | Dividing Up Triangles - Peter Giblin |
| 26th October 2002 | | Advice on Hanging Pictures - Fred Bloore Challenging Problems from Moscow II - Vladimir Zakalyukin |
| 27th April 2002 | | Towers of Hanoi - Özgür and Alana Selsil |
| 23rd March 2002 | | Sequences and Series - Satish Malik |
| 23rd February 2002 | | Sums of Distances - Peter Giblin Traditional Japanese Geometry - John Rigby |
| 26th January 2002 | | Complex Numbers and Quadratic & Cubic Forms - Ian Porteous Years, Calendars and Continued Fractions - Chris Sawer |
| 15th December 2001 | | From Maxima & Minima to Surface Shape - Peter Giblin |
| 24th November 2001 | | Challenging Problems from Moscow I - Vladimir Zakalyukin |
| 27th October 2001 | | Snowflakes and Other Fractals - Peter Giblin |
| 29th September 2001 | | Knot Theory - Toby Hall |
| 28th April 2001 | | Constructions with Circles - Peter Giblin Surreal Numbers - Mark Hollingworth |
| 24th March 2001 | | The Circle Method - Mark Hollingworth |
| 10th March 2001 | | Quadrature - Mark Hollingworth Rollers - Mark Hollingworth |
| 24th February 2001 | | Circles Through Two or Three Points - Peter Giblin Getting Close to the Square Root of Two - Victor Flynn |
| 27th January 2001 | | Iteration and Spider Diagrams - Chris Sawer Lines and Circles - Ian Porteous |
| 25th November 2000 | | Tangent Circles - Peter Giblin |
| 28th October 2000 | | Cutting a Region in half; and some Trigonometric Equations - Sasha Movchan and Peter Giblin |
| 29th June 2000 | | Tangles, Fractions and Factors - Mark Hollingworth |