Math Conference at Queen Mary University of London

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This weekend, as part of an attempt to make my application for the Goldwater National Scholarship as competitive as possible, North Central funded my travel and participation in the Early Career Mathematicians’ Autumn Conference which was put on by the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. I left Friday morning for London, and after taking a bus from the airport into the city, I settled into the hostel. I went and found the hotel that my family and I are staying at when we are back for Christmas, and I was able to find a nice restaurant that we can have Christmas dinner at. That evening, I met my friend Mackenzie, who I knew from high school, and a few of her friends that she was traveling with for dinner. We walked around for a bit before calling it a night.



The next morning featured the conference. The conference took place at Queen Mary University London in their mathematical sciences building. It featured a series of talks by mathematicians in a variety of fields. They spoke on a variety of topics including why we should teach mathematics, the relationship between mathematics and dance, the probability theory of insurance rates and even the math behind the Simpsons, which is historically the most mathematic television show. After lunch and the talks were finished, they had an “unconference” where the participants were able to write ideas for a short talk or discussion on post-it notes and then people could choose which sessions to attend. In the final session, I saw that there were limited presentations so I decided to put up a post-it to talk about my summer research, which was a good refresher for me and practice for the Joint Meetings that I will be attending in January. All in all, it was an inspiring and informative conference, and I was really glad that I was able to go. Afterwards, I went back to the hostel and had dinner there before calling it a night. Sunday morning, I took the bus to the airport and headed back to Glasgow.

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