Public and Schools Lectures

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Details of our programme of free public and schools lectures are posted below - we update this list and add new lectures regularly. If you would like to receive an email notification about future lectures and events please join our MMP events mailing list.

If you enjoy our lectures, you might also want to listen to the Plus podcast.

 

Lewis Carroll in Numberland

Thursday 23rd October 2008, 5.00 - 6.00 pm

Prof. Robin Wilson
The Open University

Venue: Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Clarkson Road, Cambridge

Charles Dodgson is best known for 'Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland', written under his pen name of Lewis Carroll. If he had not written the Alice books, he would be mainly remembered as a pioneering photographer. But if Dodgson had not written the Alice books or been a photographer, he might be remembered as a mathematician, the career he held as a lecturer at Christ Church in Oxford University. But what mathematics did he do? How good a mathematician was he? How influential was his work? This public lecture by Robin Wilson will try to answer these questions by describing his work in geometry, algebra, logic and the mathematics of voting, in the context of his other activities. This lecture will also demonstrate the many puzzles and paradoxes that he delighted in showing to his child-friends and contemporaries. Click here for poster

About the speaker:Robin Wilson is Professor of Pure Mathematics at the Open University, a Fellow in Mathematics at Keble College, Oxford University, and Emeritus Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, London (the oldest mathematical Chair in England). He has written and edited over thirty books, mainly on graph theory, the history of mathematics, and music.

Level: Open to the general public - suggested age range 16+

Particle Hunting at CERN

Tuesday 4th November 2008, 5.00 - 6.00 pm

Dr Ben Allanach
Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge

Venue: Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Clarkson Road, Cambridge

This lecture will introduce the largest and most complex dedicated experiment on earth. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN (the European centre for particle physics) is just starting up after 30 years of planning and construction. From the collisions of protons, striking each other at almost the speed of light, weird, hitherto undetected, particles can be produced. There are theoretical hopes that the Higgs particle, dark matter particles and even (as an outside possibility) extra dimensions, could be detected by analysing the spray of particles coming from the collisions. This lecture will give a flavour of what these exotic particles do, and how they might be detected.

About the speaker:Ben Allanach is a theoretical particle physicist and a lecturer at Cambridge University. He has also worked in research at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Laboratoire d'Annecy de Physique des Particules and at CERN. He is interested in how to extract information about the smallest bits of matter and the early universe from the complicated data expected from the new CERN experiment. He is very excited about analysing data from the experiment, as he has been working on how to do it for 15 years.

Level: Open to the general public - suggested age range 16+


Admission to all our lectures is free but by ticket only (unless otherwise marked): please email us stating clearly the date and title of the lecture you would like to attend and how many tickets you require, and we will confirm your ticket allocation by email. Download a map and directions to the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, where the lectures are held, unless marked otherwise, or see the University of Cambridge's online map. The main entrance to the Centre for Mathematical Sciences is via the footpath off Clarkson Road (running next to the Isaac Newton Institute car park) and then through the CMS gatehouse. This is signposted.