THE INSTITUTE OF MATHEMATICS
AND ITS APPLICATIONS

9th Younger Mathematicians Conference - reflections and report

For our 9th conference, we gathered on November 15th at De Morgan House, London. I was looking forward to the packed and varied programme arranged by our 2008 conference officer, Sarah Norton – there were ten speakers lined up! The day started well – not only through catching up with old friends and meeting some new ones over an initial cup of tea, but because I found a volunteer to help write a report on the conference: Steven Hughes, a first-year undergraduate at Greenwich University.

Before Steven’s report, I would like to share a few of my own thoughts on the day. During the lunch break, the Younger Members committee held its first ever face to face meeting! It was great to put faces to the names behind our many email conversations – and to review our activities. I was able to share the exciting news that David Abrahams will speak at our next conference in Oxford on 16th May 2009. Amy Marsh has done an excellent job of creating an advertising flyer for the Younger Members Group. We plan to obtain and distribute more copies. So look out for it! ... or request a copy from Amy.

This last year has seen a real flurry of involvement from more younger members and this has enabled the committee to form and to move forward at a greater pace on issues that are important to us. This is fantastic. But have I forgotten what some of our target audience need to hear about? Am I getting too old for the Younger Members Group?
Are my undergraduate days misting over with the fog of time? The conference reminded me of what younger mathematicians (even younger than me!) might want to find out about and what support they want from their society. For example, in a business context, we touched on how mathematical skills are great but need to be enhanced by excellent communication skills, potentially making you an even more valuable employee. Eyes were opened for those who knew nothing about funding for research, grants for projects, or industrial internships. Perhaps they had never considered this before and have been motivated to start a journey into the possibilities of mathematics beyond university. We heard from a current postgraduate what it is like to be a research student and the challenges he faces. Another speaker shared his recently published book with us - potentially inspirational!

In the afternoon session, David Youdan kindly joined the conference to take us through the potential IMA-LMS merger (using the presentation given by David Abrahams and Brian Davies on their UK tour). Even though some of the audience weren't and won't be at the appropriate level of membership to vote when the time comes, it was a great opportunity for all of us to learn more about this important topic. David also pointed us to www.newmathsoc.org.uk. for more information about the merger.

The most powerful lesson I took away from the conference: learning when it is time to take a step back and hand over the baton to the next generation of younger mathematicians to shape the group and gain what they need from the IMA. My only question: when do we start the “middle aged” or “retired younger” mathematicians group? I don’t want to lose the friendship, activity and encouragement I have gained from the support the IMA gives its younger members.

Time for that next generation to step forward! Here is an edited version of the report from Steven Hughes.

We had 10 speakers that were brilliant at listening and responding to questions from the audience.

Our first speaker was Andrew Smith from Deloitte. He spoke about maths in finance generally (compound interest, expected return) and about how the team that he manages works. We should learn all mathematics, not just typical “quant” stuff. Many more exciting areas of mathematics can solve problems that occur in the finance world. We don’t know which bit will be useful for the next problem that comes along! Contour integrals, quantum mechanics, multi-dimensional landscapes and ruin probability were just a few of Andrew's topics. Some problems can be very complex. One example took his team 10 years to solve (although it wasn't the only problem they worked on during that time!). Andrew also emphasised how important good communication is. Problems can occur not because the mathematics has errors but because the business context hasn't been fully understood and that can be because people aren't communicating effectively.

Richard Lissaman, from the Further Mathematics Network initiative of Mathematics in Education and Industry (MEI), was up next. Richard is tasked with presenting topics to schoolchildren with the aim of encouraging them to keep up mathematics. When casting around for topics he came up with the “Half-Past-Four Test” i.e. what do kids go and do after school? Can we demonstrate the maths involved in their pastimes and so get them interested? This is how he hit on... ‘The Maths of Google’! For our benefit, he included a bit more detail of the maths than he does in schools. We heard how eigenvalues and eigenvectors form the backbone of Google’s indexing system. Richard drew diagrams to explain how links from other sites are turned into “votes”, which leads to the good stuff being ranked effectively and at the top of our search list.

Before lunch, we had a couple of shorter presentations. Stephen Lee from MEI spoke about their recent ‘Mathematics at Work’ competition, held with the support of an IMA Education Grant (these grants support running or attending maths-related educational activity). The competition-winning exemplars are shown at www.mathscareers.org.uk/teaching_resources/mei_mathematics_at_work_competition.cfm. Vera Hazelwood from the Smith Institute spoke about industrial mathematical internships available for postgraduate researchers and current opportunities and funding that is available. The idea behind the internships is to increase the amount of collaborative research in mathematics, create new routes to innovation in companies and increase employability of the interns. Vera was able to tell us about one intern who went on to full time employment within the company after the end of the internship.

Noel-Ann Bradshaw from the University of Greenwich began the afternoon session, talking about her research: “Maths and money – optimisation techniques with financial applications”. Questions she posed were, “Can you find out what the market will do? Can it be predicted?” She discussed various approaches (optimisation, evolutionary algorithms, weighted moving average) and the trade-off that is made between the desires to minimise risk and maximise return. Towards the end of her talk she posed an interesting thought, “Do models falsely influence the market?”

Following tea Chris Bailey, also of the University of Greenwich, spoke about the use of mathematical modelling in the conservation project of the Cutty Sark. Built in Scotland in 1869, she eventually came to Greenwich in 1954 and became a London landmark. After outlining a vision of the Cutty Sark’s future when she reopens in spring 2010, Chris launched into an excellent discussion of how mathematics is contributing to the heritage sector. He discussed the mathematical methods (finite element analysis) used to calculate the stresses and strains on different areas of the ship and how important this was to the restoration process. He then described how they were developing a prognostics and health monitoring system which would detect how heritage structures were aging and enable funds to be targeted appropriately for maintenance.

Lloyd Kilford of Bristol University took us on a tour of “Mathematical Software”.  He demonstrated how we should be wary of rounding errors, gave us an example of a prime number, 243,112,609-1, and shared how people spend their time trying to find them! He also posed the question “open source software – yes or no?” and discussed several open source tools that he uses in his work.

Our final speaker was Gareth Howells, a postgrad from Cardiff University. He introduced his topics – “Adding fractions wrongly (and other things that I do)!” – with an extract from a letter by John Farey to The Philosophical Magazine (Vol 47, 1816, pp385-386). He showed us the Farey series and Farey tree, and introduced a real life application, to the properties of magnets (spin). Gareth also gave an excellent outline of life as a postgrad funded by EPSRC: how research involves lots of reading, calculating, LaTeXing and networking and trying to stay clear of distractions!!