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Newsletter
THE LIMS SCHOOLS COMPETITION
The LIMS Schools Competition was launched in 2007.
• The competition was open to teams of students from all schools and 6th form colleges who participated in the conference Mathematics at the School-University Interface: New Approaches on March 12th 2007 at LIMS.
• The challenge was to choose a topic from our list, investigate it and prepare a poster to communicate your findings to an audience of other A-level mathematics students. Some of the topics were discussed at the conference on March 12th; others were new. The topics page below was intended to provide some inspiration.
• For an electronic document, the project was to be submitted as an email attachment (preferably as a PDF file) to: office@lims.ucl.ac.uk. For a paper project, the requirement was to post it to LIMS Schools' Competition 2007 at the address above. The deadline was Monday July 2nd 2007.
The competition was judged by a panel consisting of mathematicians and education experts, and the projects were judged both on their mathematics and the communication of the ideas. The winners were announced in September, and prizes were awarded at the event in November featuring Professor Marcus du Sautoy and Simon Singh.
RULES
The competition was a project-based learning challenge in which teams of school students, with teachers and university students, competed to create the best posters on the topics offered. The team which created the winning poster was eligible for a prize, and entries may be published on this website. The competition was sponsored by the Lighthill Institute of Mathematical Sciences. By participating in the competition, each team member accepted the conditions stated in these rules and agreed to be bound by the decisions of the judges.
SCHEDULE
Entry submission deadline: 5pm on Monday July 2nd, 2007. Winners Announced: Early September 2007. Prize presentations: November 2007 at the Lighthill Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
Competition Requirements were stated thus:
To participate in the competition, each team must
• Belong to a school whose members have attended the conference Mathematics at the School-University Interface: New Approaches on March 12th 2007.
• Work on one of the topics supplied with help from their teachers and from university students, using contacts made at the conference.
• Produce a poster, readable by other A-level mathematics students, presenting their work.
• Submit the entry. The completed poster should be emailed to office@lims.ucl.ac.uk or posted to LIMS at the address above along with details of the team names and school name.
• Wait as the judges make their final decisions. An independent panel of judges will evaluate the entry based on both the mathematics involved and its communication. Winners will be announced on this website in early September 2007.
Each decision of the judges, shall, in all respects, be final, binding, and not be subject to review.
Topic Categories
Entries must be submitted in one of the following categories, which are described more fully on the topics page:
• Card tricks
• League tables
• Saturn orbits
• Mathematical game
JUDGING
The entries were judged by a panel of mathematicians and education specialists including Teresa Smart, Regional Coordinator for London for the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics and Director of the London Mathematics Centre. The criteria included both the mathematics involved and how well it was communicated.
AWARDS AND PRIZES
There was a prize for the winning entry. The prize was presented at the evening event of the Lighthill Institute of Mathematical Sciences in November 2007, featuring Marcus du Sautoy and Simon Singh.
PROJECT TOPICS
THE WORLD'S SIMPLEST CARD TRICK!
Take a pack of cards, and ask your volunteer from the audience to name any two cards - just the values, not the suits (e.g. "Queen" and "King" or "five" and "nine"). Concentrate, get them to shuffle the pack, then look through: their two selected cards will be together - or perhaps just a card apart. If it doesn't work first time, concentrate harder, and try it again. Why does this card trick work? It's probability but can you work out how likely the trick is to work?
If you've solved that, what are the chances of three volunteer selected cards being together? Would that be a good trick to do?
You can see some more "magic" here.
Thanks to Professor Peter McOwan of QMUL
LEAGUE TABLES
We all know how the football league works: three points for a win, two for a draw, and the team with the most points at the end of the season is the winner. But is this fair? Shouldn't it be worth more points to beat a really good side?
The challenge with this idea is working out which are the really good sides at the same time as allocating the points. Use as data the Scottish Premier League results for 1999-2000 (only 10 teams), which are available here. What different strategies can you use to rank the teams? How much difference does a giant-killers' bonus make?
Thanks to Dr. Helen Wilson of UCL
THE CASSINI MISSION TO SATURN
The Cassini spacecraft, currently in orbit around the planet Saturn, has shown that the rings of Saturn have an intricate radial structure. This was first detected by the two Voyager spacecraft more than 20 years ago. A lot of the structure is due to "resonances" between Saturn's moons and the ring particles, where the orbital period of each is in a simple numerical ratio. The challenge is to find out what moons are responsible for what structure by comparing predicted resonance locations with NASA data derived from instruments on the Voyager spacecraft instruments on the Voyager spacecraft. More details are available here and you can download this.
Thanks to Professor Carl Murray of QMUL
MATHEMATICAL GAME
There are several numbers-based games around, like Sudoku or the Countdown numbers game. Can you come up with one that's as much fun? Puzzles to solve individually or a competitive game, the choice is up to you. Be as imaginative as you like: there are no restrictions as long as the game has some mathematical content.
Thanks to Dr. Steve Baigent of UCL
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