Programme and Bookings

IMA Festival 2022: Programme & Bookings

Due to high demand we have now made the decision to close bookings for Monday 4th July. We are still accepting bookings for Tuesday 5th July, as well as the Public Lecture in the evening.

How does the festival work?

We will offer bookings out on the basis of a half-day, full-day or two-day slot. Booking onto the event is required to attend talks, workshops and/or activities. While we encourage School/College groups to move around the Festival and explore it as they like, each pupil can be booked onto a maximum of two talks prior to the event (the talks are taking part in the lecture theatre and the talks rooms). Your talk bookings will be honoured until the hour, so please arrive promptly. If there are any spare spaces or a group hasn’t turned up by the hour, then we will allow entry without booking. The workshops and activities aren’t bookable. The bookings and workshop/activities/spare talk places will operate on a first come first serve basis, but there are plenty of sessions and a lot of repetition in the programme. Scroll down to the end of the page for links to the full programme and abstracts for more information.

Bookings are made by emailing sclo@shu.ac.uk Please include the following information in your booking email:

Teacher name and contact details
Name of institution
Number of students you will be bringing
Year group of the students
The talks you’d like to reserve places for and the number of pupils for each one

We have a jam-packed programme on both days of the festival, with something for every year group from 7 to 13, and a range of topics in mathematics – along with real-world applications, and connections to engineering, biology, physics and art.

As part of the event we have some Women in Maths sessions, which are aimed at female-identifying pupils and will be celebrating women’s achievements within Mathematics by showcasing some great female speakers sharing their favourite maths topics. All students are welcome to attend the sessions, but if you have female-identifying students we encourage you to bring them along to these talks.

Note that the programme is subject to change. Here’s a summary of the highlights to help you decide when to come:

Monday 4th July

Our speakers and workshop leads on the first day include:

Aoife Hunt: Celebrating women in maths: ‘The Maths of Crowds’ – find out about how mathematical modelling can help design buildings to allow everyone to get out safely in an emergency

Yolanda Ohene: ‘Science, statistics & SARS-CoV-2’ – learn about Yolanda’s experiences during the pandemic, and how statistics can help fight infectious diseases

Katie Steckles: ‘Unsolved puzzles’ – discover some of the biggest open problems in mathematics

Nira Chamberlain: ‘The mathematics of an AI basketball player’ – in this interactive workshop, use a mathematical simulation to operate an AI Basketball player

Clarissa Grandi: ‘Curves of pursuit’ – design beautiful spiral art based on the mathematical patterns in the behaviour of predatory bugs

Hana Ayoob: ‘Shape and symmetry’ – construct a mandala pattern with artist Hana and investigate symmetry and shape

You’ll also be able to hear from a real Operational Researcher from the OR Society, and the Royal Institution will present their workshop on graph theory, ‘How networks rule the world’.

Talks by SHU staff and alumni will include:

‘Hamilton: not the musical’
‘The digital revolution on the influence of technology in the modern world’
‘Maths in Finance, Banking and Economics’
‘There are 40,320 ways to give this talk’ covering the world of combinatorics.

Workshops by SHU staff will also include:

‘The mathematics of juggling’
‘Infectious disease spread modelling’
‘Playful puzzles and games’
A robots workshop, where you can meet the robot E-puck
And a version of our famous PopMaths quiz – with prizes to be won!

Our sponsors the IMA will also be bringing along some activities, including their foam cube challenge, and the hands-on maths zone where you can explore some physical principles like chaos and probability. The UK’s first hands-on maths discovery centre, MathsCity in Leeds, will be sending over their Leonardo Dome for you to build, and UCL’s Chalkdust Magazine are bringing their MENACE machine – a machine learning pile of matchboxes you can play a game against. We’ll also have a mathematical treasure hunt and some mathematical buskers performing tricks, as well as a chance to play some games in our Maths Arcade.

Tuesday 5th July

Our speakers and workshop leads on the second day:

Susan Okereke: Celebrating women in maths: ‘Distance-time graphs – what’s the story?’ – explore distance-time graphs in this interactive challenge session

Rob Eastaway (Maths Inspiration): ‘From monopoly to greed – the maths of money games’ – play some games with Rob and find out how maths can help you win!

James Grime: ‘Bits and pieces – secrets of a digital world’ – see Numberphile favourite James sharing the mathematics behind electronic communication

Samira Mian: ‘Recreating Islamic geometric patterns’ – using isometric paper, recreate some beautiful historical geometric patterns

Takita Bartlett-Lashley: ‘Stats in style’ – join STEM fashionista Takita and use stats to explore the environmental impact of the fashion industry

Alison Kiddle: ‘Staying between the lines, thinking outside the box’ – can you solve Alison’s square pattern challenges and learn how to think like a mathematician?

Talks by SHU staff and alumni will include:

‘Population dynamics, chaos and zombies’
‘The mathematics of genetics’
‘I can do rocket science and so can you’ (including some live demonstrations)
‘Modelling the circulatory system’ covering some applications of maths in biology
‘A-level mechanics in engineering’
‘The maths of unusual and extreme materials and their applications’

Workshops by SHU staff will also include:

‘Programming with marbles’ – a chance to build a simple working computer from moving components
‘Statistical catapults’ using real catapults to mathematically optimise the trajectory of a missile
A cryptography workshop
A version of our famous PopMaths quiz – with prizes to be won!