LMS Popular Lectures 2021

Programme (All times BST)

18.00   Welcome and Introduction
            Kevin Houston (LMS Education Secretary)

The maths of crowd behaviour 
            Aoife Hunt (Movement Strategies)

How many people can you fit into a football stadium or a music festival? How quickly are they all going to be able to get out?  These are important questions for event organisers, and they need mathematicians to answer them. In this talk, Aoife Hunt shows how professional consultants use GSCE maths to understand the movement of crowds: whether at Wembley Stadium, Glastonbury, Canary Wharf or the Tower of London. Discover the unlikely connection between crowd flow and quadratic equations, and how computer games are being built to predict what you will do in an emergency.

19.00   Break

19.15   Patterns in the primes
James Maynard (University of Oxford)

Why should anyone care about primes? Prime numbers can appear to be mathematical oddities but are actually vital objects not just in pure mathematics, but also in the real world. Various different, difficult problems in science lead to seemingly very simple questions about prime numbers and looking for patterns within the primes.
Unfortunately, these seemingly simple problems have stumped mathematicians for thousands of years and are now some of the most notorious open problems in mathematics! I'll describe why primes matter, some of these simple-looking questions about primes, and how we can still make progress on these 100-year-old problems.

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Videos of previous LMS Popular Lectures are also available on YouTube.