It’s official! For a second year, The Big Internet Math-Off and World’s Most Interesting Mathematician has been won by a member of the IMA who works in industry. Following Dr Nira Chamberlain (IMA President Designate), Dr Sophie Carr CMath CSci MIMA won this year’s competition which saw 16 mathematicians from across the world (including lecturers, researchers, writers, and business owners) pitch against each other explaining how fun, interesting and relevant maths is.
There was a slight change to the competition this year as it was no longer a straight knock-out competition, but instead there was a group stage where the winner of each group went through to the knock-out semis and then the final. This meant that the finalists had to think of five pitches showing, in their opinion an “ooohhhh” piece of maths, the interesting fact you’d share with a friend. Each match against another competitor was open to a 24 hour public vote, with the winner being the person who received the most votes.
Sophie, who has always enjoyed puzzles and patterns really didn’t think she’d get out of the group stages decided to make all her group pitches about the areas of maths that always make her smile, from her A levels (Bernoulli’s equation and why shower curtains stick to you) through to undergraduate (the Navier Stokes equations and why they are a Millennium problem ) and then her PhD and career (Bayes theorem, this time in the context of the Monty Hall problem with cakes and sweets)
Sophie says , “I was thrilled that the IMA were so helpful when they found out I was going to be in the competition. They kindly offered to let me come along to the head office and use the Bernoulli blower and the working aerofoil. Being able to show the maths in action makes such a difference to what you can communicate and how you can communicate maths. I’m sure having the videos made a real difference to how my pitches were received”
In the semi-final Sophie moved onto the Simpson’s paradox but again showing the application to the real world in trying to work out who should get the company bonus (of ice lollies) For the final, Sophie applied probability trees to show this humble approach can be used to calculate conditional probabilities, inverse probabilities (Bayes Theorem) and check for the prosecutor’s fallacy. The final was a deservedly close run contest between Sophie and Sameer Shah who works in New York. Certainly the time difference posed a challenge and at 6:30 in the morning, Sophie was 108 votes behind. However, always up for a challenge, Sophie went onto social media so see if she could close the gap and with an hour to go only 5 votes separated the two finalists. It wasn’t until the last 30 minutes that Sophie took the lead.
Sophie thoroughly enjoyed taking part, telling us “It was really hard to fit in writing all the pitches around work, the standard of all the pitches was amazing and I learnt so much during the month. Everyone was really friendly but one of the best aspects of the competition was becoming a sticker in a sticker book, which included shiny stickers! After a month of maths and 54 pitches, the legacy of the competition is a wonderful compendium of resources written by people who love maths that can be accessed by everyone. Maths is the real winner.”