THE INSTITUTE OF MATHEMATICS
AND ITS APPLICATIONS

Younger Mathematicians Conference, Cardiff 24th May 2008

The splendid Main Building of Cardiff University was the meeting place for the 8th Younger Mathematicians conference. It was a lovely bright May morning and I appreciated the refreshments that were available after the long trek on the train (already busy with sports fans for the various events that were also taking place that day) to perk me up before the first session!

At 10:30am we were ushered along to the lecture theatre. On entering the room we were met with intriguing looking “games” – bright coloured interactive exhibits – sitting and possibly waiting for us to play with. You could be forgiven for not paying attention to the introduction of Tina Crimp from Techniquest! Tina gave us an excellent summary of who Techniquest are and what they do, including an unbelievable statistic that they have 6000 11 to 14 year olds through the door over the course of 4 weeks for their maths show “Mathimagic”. A staggering thought!

In partnership with Mathcymru they aim to promote in young people an interest in mathematics and to contribute to the drive to raise standards of numeracy in schools.

This was the source of the “games” that make up part of Maths Kits. These, along with lesson plans and teacher notes, are a collection of hands-on activities that require pupils (but us today!) to solve various problems, covering various areas of the curriculum. The moment had at last arrived and we (some faster than others!) descended from our seats to play…oh, and learn!!

This packing cube was a challenge…and very frustrating! Not as easy as it looks and took longer than we anticipated to solve!	A fun way to while away the time, moving rings from column to column and learning the patterns as you go.

Lunchtime came and went with all of us enjoying the spread and the chance to network before it was time to return to our seats. With such a fun start to the day I wondered how we would settle into the afternoon. Prof Alex Balinsky gave us a lively tour of “Mathematical Foundations of Internet Security” and kept us enthralled for over the allocated time slot! A particularly visual story regarding boxes, chains, locks and the repeated delivery of the said box between two gentlemen that sparked the idea of key encryption was very helpful. We were taken through Kerckhoffs’ Desiderata and the Diffie-Hellman key exchange before bringing the tour to a close by touching on data hiding.

The cryptography theme continued with Alexandra Alecu (research student, Loughborough University) presenting her research to us, “The k-Error  linear complexity of cryptographic sequences”. Indeed, a scary title but competently presented by Alexandra – stepping through algorithms, the keystream generator, Blahut’s Theorem and the “Hamming weight”. (I am less familiar with this area of mathematics and must admit that Prof Balinsky’s talk enabled me to get more out of Alexandra’s talk that I might have done!)

The afternoon continued with Sarah Shepherd, editor of iSquared Magazine (a “popular maths” magazine launched in September 2007 and supported by small grants from IMA and LMS).  Sarah gave us a tour of her mathematics career and her route to studying for a PhD at Nottingham University and what inspired her to begin the iSquared magazine. She outlined her vision for moving the magazine forward and invited anyone who was interested in writing for the magazine to have a go!

We finished the day with Dan Tilley giving an update on the Younger Members committee – now up and running and already discussing plans!

The conference was competently hosted by Sarah Norton (Conference Leader on the Younger members group) and she did an excellent job of creating a friendly and relaxed atmosphere. I look forward to attending the 9th Younger Mathematicians conference on 15th November 2008 at De Morgan House, London.

Georgina Griffiths