This year’s Festival of Science and Curiosity runs from 13-20 February 2019.

The University of Nottingham’s School of Mathematical Sciences is contributing various activities on Saturday 16th February.

I’ll be involved in the activities at Green’s Windmill and Science Centre. We will have a variety of mathematical games, puzzles and exhibits, including Rubik’s Cubes, Towers of Hanoi, and gyroscopes balancing on strings.

Separately, at a stall in Broadmarsh Shopping Centre, there will be a group of PhD students from our MASS group (Modelling and Analytics for a Sustainable Society). They have some activities and games relating to mathematical research concerning sustainability and antimicrobial resistance.

Here is a question I am often asked by my first-year students. Why do we need a name for the condition of surjectivity, when you can always change the codomain to be equal to the image, and make your function surjective that way? (I am avoiding the word ‘range’, because that turns out to be used differently by different authors.)

I don’t know currently what the best answer to this is, though I have some ideas.

I could refer to mathematical tradition, and talk about the flexibility of the standard approach. For example, I think it is quite useful that we have a large set of functions from to given by polynomial functions with real coefficients, and it would be inconvenient if we couldn’t say where these functions were mapping to without calculating the image. Off the top of my head, consider, for example, a polynomial function defined on . What is its image? Do we really want to have to calculate the image before we can say what the codomain is? It seems relatively easy just to treat it as a function from to that isn’t surjective.

I suppose though that we could just say that it is a function from to its image. Is there any problem with that? Well maybe it gets a bit complicated later when you start looking at homomorphisms in algebra, but you can probably work round that.

I expect that a category theorist would have something to say on this issue! But what is the best thing to say to a first-year undergraduate?

Yesterday was a first-year class where I briefly looked at the quotient mapping associated with an equivalence relation, and then showed the class a cylinder and a Moebius strip. That gave me the chance to ask them “Why did the chicken cross the Moebius strip?” Someone always gives me the “correct” answer, as long as I am patient and encouraging!

When I detached the cover from my surface pro today at the start of my class I was faced with a blank screen, and multiple (and increasingly desperate) long presses of the power button had no effect. I thought I was going to have to do the best I could with the resident desktop PC instead. But first I thought I’d try attaching the cover again and then opening it. Amazingly the machine sprang back to life!

The mysteries of computers …. (phew!)

Below is a message I just sent to our first year students about a connection between modular arithmetic and working in other bases. I don’t know if this helps, but somehow arithmetic modulo 10 always seems so easy to explain!

Continue reading →

Long-time readers will know that I use Pen Attention by Kenrick Mock to highlight the cursor position when I want a digital pointer in my classes.

I found out today that when Drawboard PDF is in its (most) fullscreen mode, the Pen Attention highlighter is invisible. So I will have to avoid that if I want to do any digital pointing! I can still have plenty of writing space, just not everything.

To clarify: you can maximise the window, but there is also a “full screen” button which is more drastic. Maximising the window is fine: Pen Attention still displays the digital pointer OK. But in “full screen” mode, DrawBoard PDF hides everything else, including Pen Attention.

As I haven’t managed to resolve some of the inking issues when using Bluebeam PDF Revu on my Surface Pro 4, I am going to give Drawboard PDF a try when annotating my lecture/workshop slides. The inking is very good! However it takes quite a few clicks to insert a blank page if needed, so it will be best if I have the right number of blank pages in my document before I start. Actually, one of the most common requests from students last year was that I should include enough blank space in their notes for them to write down my annotations, so that gives me two reasons to do so. I’ll base the number of blank pages on the number of extra pages I needed last year.

[Note added August 2018: The link below will stop working at some point, as we are switching over to a new Echo360 system. I’ll see if I can make some videos available on the new system. The YouTube and iTunes videos should be safe!]

The Echo360 recordings from the 2016-17 edition of G11FPM Foundations of Pure Mathematics are now available at

[old link no longer works]

See also http://wp.me/posHB-AC for links to the G11FPM Echo360 video archives from the autumns of 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015.

The Smith review of post-16 mathematics has now been published, along with a response letter from the Government.

See

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/smith-review-of-post-16-maths-report-and-government-response

Clearly the issue is being taken seriously, and steps will be taken to encourage more uptake and better provision. Universities will probably have an increased role in supporting post-16 maths through outreach and enrichment. Here are two extracts from the Government’s response letter (written by Nick Gibb).

…..

First, I agree that good quality teaching is vital, and to boost the capacity of schools and colleges to deliver Core Maths and A level mathematics and further mathematics I am pleased to announce a new £16 million Level 3 Maths Support Programme. It will build on the momentum created by the Further Mathematics and Core Maths Support Programmes, and will work with schools and colleges to improve mathematics education by sharing best practice, and delivering knowledge-rich curriculum materials, as well as working to increase participation and attainment in 16-18 mathematics. The programme will work to deliver focused intervention targeted to those who need it most.

…..

Fifthly, I also welcome your recommendations on encouraging universities to widen access by supporting 16-18 mathematics education. Universities are an important influence on students’ post-16 choices. In response to your recommendations, we are working with institutions such as the Royal Society and British Academy to encourage universities and employers to signal the value of level 3 mathematics qualifications for entry to undergraduate courses with a significant quantitative element and for a wide range of job roles.

We are now into Open Day season! Open Days at the University of Nottingham run today and tomorrow, and there are two more in September. (See
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/ugstudy/visitingus/opendays/opendays.aspx
and
https://nottingham.ac.uk/mathematics/prospective/opendays/index.aspx)

I’m using my Surface Pro for my talks again. Mostly it is behaving well, so far though I did have to restart shortly before one of my talks when BlueBeam temporarily refused to run. After a restart everything was fine again. (It is good that the machine restarts quickly, that is, as long as it doesn’t have to install lots of updates!)

As last year, I have made use of Gunnar Andersson’s excellent software WZebra (see http://radagast.se/othello/download.html) to help with my fun morning talk on strategy for the board game Othello at our Open Days.

I do explain some mathematical aspects to Othello endgame strategy, but mostly this is just a fun session for visitors who don’t go to the first of our main talks! #

I usually have an audience of about 10 for Othello, while the main talks often have over 150 (and on particularly busy days it can be 300+).

On June 17th the University of Nottingham is running Wonder

The School of Mathematical Sciences is contributing: our event this year is called Othello at the Casino. See http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/wonder/activities/othello-at-the-casino.aspx for a description of our activities. From there I quote:

Othello at the casino

11:00 AM – 5:00 PM

Try your luck at the roulette table (no real money involved!), and learn aspects of the strategy for the board game Othello. You can also take part in games and puzzles and develop your problem-solving skills.

Drop in anytime

Zone 2 – Engineering and Science Learning Centre, B01

Suitable for 7+

No problems recently during classes. But the Surface did lose touch with its pen just now when I was looking through today’s annotated slides. I used Hongfei Yang’s suggestion of twisting the back of the pen to deactivate the pen battery and then activate it again. This didn’t work first time (but perhaps I didn’t completely deactivate the battery, or didn’t wait long enough) but worked on the second attempt. Certainly better than restarting the Surface!

I wonder whether moving the pen out of Bluetooth range and then moving it back into range would have a similar effect? I’ll try that next time!

The dock continues to work very well (so far!).

Unfortunately today the Surface lost touch with its pen again. After trying two restarts and opening various control panels related to the pen, I had to give up and use the “spare” tablet I had brought with me.

3 hours later, I woke the Surface up and it found its pen immediately.

Has anyone found a reliable way to help the Surface to find its pen again when it loses touch with it? (The pen battery level is fine.) On other tablets, when they lose touch with their pen, I have found that switching back and forth between laptop and tablet mode helps. Maybe what I should try with the Surface is attaching the keyboard and detaching it again!

Well the dock for my Surface Pro 4 has arrived, and my Windows Surface is now working with external displays again. Though it didn’t work at first: it turns out that my current display adapter was broken too. With a new adapter (mini-display port to VGA) and the dock all is well.

The new adapter does work intermittently with the direct display port on the surface, but the connection is wobbly and unreliable.

One big advantage of using the dock is that the adapter and VGA cable can then rest safely on the desk/lectern. So I can use my Surface on a laptop stand on a box (for extra height and better writing angle) without there being an issue of the weight of the VGA cable pulling on the adapter and indirectly on the mini display port connection.

Has anyone else had similar problems? I know that some people have abandoned writing with the Surface on a slope because of problems with the connector. Perhaps some good will come of my problems if it helps others in my situation!