The Cambridge Science Festival is on from March 12 to March 25. We've picked out some maths goodies for you.

• A mathematical look at the Olympics — March 12, 6pm-7pm, Mill Lane Lecture Rooms, Mill Lane
  To prepare competitors and spectators for London 2012, Professor John Barrow casts a mathematical eye over a wide range of Olympic sporting events. A little elementary maths can help us appreciate what is going on in a range of running, swimming, jumping, throwing, paddling, lifting, swinging and wheelchair racing events. He will also examine some of the strange scoring systems that sports employ.
• How fast can Usain Bolt run? — March 24, 12.30pm-1.30pm, Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Clarkson Road
  How could Usain Bolt improve his world 100 metres sprint record significantly without improving his speed? How fast should he be able to run? Professor John Barrow answers these and other questions in this talk, which also looks at the mechanics of sprinting and the effects of wind assistance, timing accuracy and altitude on sprint times.
• Hands on maths fair, age 5+ — March 17, 12noon-4pm, The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street and March 24, 12noon-4pm, Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Clarkson Road
  Games and puzzles for all ages from the University's Millennium Mathematics Project. Pit your wits against the SOMA cube, tangrams, Auntie's Tea Cups or giant dominoes, and sharpen your strategic reasoning skills!
• Maths of sport pentathlon — March 24, 12noon-4pm, Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Clarkson Road
  Explore some of the maths hidden in the Olympic and Paralympic Games! Challenge yourself to complete the Maths of Sport Pentathlon, a series of hands-on mathematical activities focusing on Olympic and Paralympic sports and infrastructure.
• On the shoulders of Eastern giants — March 16, 5pm-6pm, Babbage Lecture Theatre, New Museums Site
  We learn at school that Isaac Newton is the father of modern optics, that Copernicus heralded the birth of astronomy, and that it is Snell's law of refraction. But what is the debt these men owe to the physicists and astronomers of the medieval Islamic Empire? Men such as Ibn al-Haytham, Avicenna, Biruni, Ibn Sahl, al-Tusi and Ibn al-Shatir. In this Andrew Chamblin memorial lecture; Jim Al-Khalili will tell the story of these fascinating characters. You need to pre-book, visit the festival website.
• The wonders of biostatistics — March 17, 10am-4pm, drop in, Old Examination Hall, Free School Lane
  Come and explore with us how biostatistics can be used to improve health. Try our four different activities in which your creativity and thinking abilities will help you to solve the challenges we'll give you!
• Alan Turing and the Enigma cipher — March 22, 8pm-9pm, Babbage Lecture Theatre, New Museums Site
  In the centenary year of Alan Turing's birth, Simon Singh discusses the German Enigma cipher machine and how it was cracked by Alan Turing and the other codebreakers at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. The lecture will include a demonstration of a genuine working Enigma machine. You need to pre-book, visit the festival website.

 

If you've been worrying about how to combine the imminent Olympic fever with that other great passion — maths — then salvation is about to arrive. John D Barrow, eminent cosmologist, best selling author and director of the Millennium Mathematics Project (of which Plus is a part), has written a book, 100 essential things you didn't know you didn't know about sport, exploring the maths behind your favourite disciplines. And if you're near London or Cambridge you can see Barrow himself talk about some of its contents — for free!

Cambridge, March 12: As part of the Cambridge Science Festival Barrow will cast a mathematical eye over a wide range of Olympic sporting events. 6pm-7pm, Mill Lane Lecture Rooms, Mill Lane. More information on the festival website.

Cambridge, March 24: Another sporty lecture as part of the Cambridge Science Festival. 12.30pm-1.30pm, Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Clarkson Road. More information on the festival website.

London, March 15: Barrow will mark the publication of his book with a free lecture at Gresham College. 6pm, Barnard's Inn Hall, Holborn, London EC1N 2HH. More information on the Gresham College website.

The book 100 essential things you didn't know you didn't know about sport asks what mathematics can tell us about sport. It sheds light on the mysteries of running, jumping, swimming and points scoring across the whole sporting spectrum. Consisting of one hundred short pieces that range across a wide number of sports, it's a great read whether you're a competitor striving to go faster or higher, or an armchair enthusiast wanting to understand more. You can find out why high-jumpers use the Fosbury Flop, how fast Usain Bolt can ultimately run, why there are so many different scoring systems in sport, what the best strategy for taking football penalties is, why golf balls are dimpled, why the bounce of a Superball seems to defy Newton's laws of motion, and much more.

Interested in the connections between art and science? Then come to this free public lecture at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge on March 14, 2012 to hear theoretical physicist David Berman and artist Grenville Davey talk about string theory as an inspiration to art.

String theory is at the cutting edge of theoretical physics. Its deep goal is to unify quantum mechanics and relativity. In doing so, string theory brings up new ways of seeing the world, with hidden dimensions and novel surprising symmetries and relationships. This event will begin with an accessible introduction to string theory by David Berman followed by a presentation and discussion with Grenville Davey on his art and how aspects of string theory and contemporary physics have been an inspiration. A wine reception will follow.

Grenville Davey is a Turner Prize winning sculptor who is currently artist-in-residence at the Institute. His recent interests and work have been inspired by the ideas from string theory and its way of describing our universe. David Berman is currently organising a programme at the Institute on string theory and is an expert in M-theory, an extension of string theory.

To request free tickets to this event please contact the Isaac Newton Institute by phoning +44 (0)1223 335999 or emailing reception@newton.ac.uk. Some tickets will also be available on the night but pre-booking is recommended. This event is likely to be suitable for interested people age 14+. It starts at 6.30pm and lasts for an hour.

For further information see the Newton Institute website.

Rachel and Marianne at the Vancouver Aquarium

This week saw the opening of the Plus Canada office for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Vancouver. We were very excited to join the other 8000 delegates, speakers, journalists and exhibitors at the opening ceremony on Thursday evening. After a traditional welcome from Chief Jacob and his niece, from one of the First Nations local to Vancouver, Nina Federoff, President of the AAAS, told us her story in science. And it was quite a story: from taking college classes at 16, dropping out of school and having her first child at 17, she struggled her way through university as a single mother to finally become a world-renowned geneticist and molecular biologist.

We also heard from a number of other speakers, including our old friend Neil Turok, previously at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge but now Director of the Perimeter Institute here in Canada. Turok said that science and education will give us the tools to solve the problems facing the world today. And he suggested a new slogan for the meeting, "Seven billion minds", saying that the young people on the planet are our greatest resource and with our help will tackle these problems in the future.

Our first day was rounded off by a lovely dinner with jelly fish and dolphins at the Vancouver Aquarium. We met up with some of the other journalists from around the world, including visitors from Australia, Germany and Finland. You can listen to a quick podcast of our thoughts from the first day here.

Friday started bright and early with a Press Breakfast about Canada's relationship with the oceans and Arctic. Sherilee Harper from the University of Guelph is studying the relationship between weather, water and health and told us how climate change was already affecting the indigenous populations of Canada. For example, many people in these communities prefer to drink fresh brook water than treated water out of the tap. However her studies have revealed that bacterial levels in these streams increase sharply after heavy rains, which can be directly linked to increased clinic visits in the local communities for gastrointestinal illness in the weeks that follow.

We spoke to another of the panel members, Marcel Babin from the Université Laval, who uses satellite images to monitor the biodiversity in the Arctic ocean. His team also conduct experiments in the lab of how algal growth is affected by changing light levels. The mathematical models they produce can then feed into predictive models of how changing sea ice levels in the Arctic will affect biodiversity, and how this changing biodiversity will itself impact on climate change. You can listen to the podcast of our interview here.

Later on in the day we stayed with biomass, this time the 100 billion tons of it produced annually by plants through photosynthesis. Greg Scholes from the University of Toronto has been studying how plants do it. In his experiments he found that delicate quantum effects, which people didn't think could survive very long in the real world, played an important role in photosynthesis, a discovery which may opens the way for the new field of quantum biology. You can read our article of Scholes' work here.

And of course this was only a handful of the myriad of topics on offer on Friday. We also managed to catch a session on how topology is saving the day when it comes to analysing large datasets, particularly in biology. And we caught up with the latest news from CERN and Fermilab: they should have definitive evidence of the existence or non-existence of the Higgs by the end of the year (you can read more on the Higgs Boson and the LHC here), and experiments to try to replicate the faster-than-light neutrino results from the OPERA experiment are already under way with results expected this Summer.