IMA National Celebration of the Best Maths Project 2024
IMA National Celebration of the Best Maths Project 2024, featuring talks by Will Barnfield (University of Liverpool) and Maria Esteban Casadevall (Heriot-Watt University).
For those who were unable to attend this event, a recording has now been added to the IMA YouTube Channel here.
To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the IMA, the IMA ran a national competition where universities across the country were given the opportunity to put forward their top BSc student. The top scoring student from each university was invited to take part in the competition, sharing a topic from Maths/Stats or OR.
Will Barnfield and Maria Esteban Casadevall were awarded first and second place respectively, and will deliver talks based on their respective projects.
Abstracts
Vibrations of an N-gon mass-spring system and further geometry
Have you ever wondered why when an object vibrates it has a specific frequency? Take a tuning fork, for example—why does it have that pitch? This is due to a concept called vibrational modes, and this project is an exploration of them. I will first look at a simple symmetric mass-spring system, to introduce modes, then build on this model by extending the structure and discovering that some quite beautiful patterns emerge. Gyroscopes will then be introduced, and these will be used to model rotating bodies, altering the dynamics of the system. Finally, I will discuss a three-dimensional structure, constructed with platonic polyhedra, that I’m currently studying for its potential geophysical applications.
