Maths Week 2016

A big high five goes to the 300 third/fourth and a few fifth class students and their teachers for coming to the library for our number treasure hunt last week (and those who came the week before or a week after).  Serious number crunching and mental maths was to be had and we used our numbers to make a magic square to complete the challenge…and as it turns out, they are quite tough to solve!

If you think 300 is an awfully big number, you would be very wrong, thanks to Dr David Conlon of Oxford University who came on Saturday 22nd October to tell us about some big numbers in his talk, ‘Large Numbers and where to find them’.

Our warm up number of 365 began by trying to find if two people in the room shared a birthday, on the 8th person – bingo!  We were then introduced to numbers that grew and grew…and grew in size from estimating the number of people aboard one of the world’s biggest cruise ships, to the number of ants in the world to every person and how far they would reach if they were placed in a queue (to the sun by the way!) and finally onto the final number, and a particular passion of David’s, the Rubik cube…The number of different combinations you can make with that 3x3x3 cube is incomprehensible!

A fascinating talk and great thanks to the audience too for their much appreciated input!  We do hope to ask David back next year, so watch this space!