Pupils from the Third Form and Lower Sixth had the opportunity to ‘rock’ maths when we welcomed Dr Tom Crawford, a Mathematics tutor at the University of Oxford, to Cokethorpe. Dr Crawford runs the award-winning website tomrocksmaths.com (YouTube channel @tomrocksmaths).
Have you ever wondered how the England Football team could improve their penalty shootouts? Well, Dr Crawford may just have the answer! His engaging talk to the Third Form demonstrated how mathematics could assist.
He then introduced the Sixth Form mathematicians to the seven Millennium Maths problems, Millennium Problems | Clay Mathematics Institute, including the Poincare Conjecture (the shape-shifting world of topology). For those who do not have the time, you will be pleased to hear the Poincare Conjecture has already been solved (it took the Clay Institute eight years to verify the solution submitted by Gregori Perelman). Can you take any four-dimensional smooth object, that does not have any holes, and turn it into a sphere? The answer is yes, you can!
