Happy International Women's Day 2016!
The video above is one of our favourite talks from the last 12 months: it's by Sydney Padua, graphic artist, animator and creator of the wonderful Thrilling adventures of Lovelace and Babbage. Padua's talk, part of the Ada Lovelace Symposium in December 2015, explains how she used historical newspaper reports, letters and mathematical text books, as well as her extraordinary skill and imagination, to create the comic series featuring mathematicians Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage in a parallel universe where they built a giant calculating machine to fight crime and have adventures. The comics originally appeared online but now are also available in a beautiful book which we are currently savouring. Stay tuned for a review soon. As well as writing the thrilling adventures, Padua also built the first virtual analytical engine (essentially the first ever computer, conceived by Charles Baggage with lots if input from Lovelace) in 3D animation software — a beautiful sight to behold, which elicited gasps of admiration from the mathematicians, computer scientists and historians in the audience.
The Symposium featured many fascinating talks: you can read some highlights in Analysing Ada and watch many of them on the Symposium website. Our favourites include Judith Grabiner's talk on the radical changes in the 19th century that produced new ideas of space, revolutionising art, making relativity possible and helping create modernism, and the talk by June Barrow-Green about the fascinating stories you can find in mathematical archives.
One of our other favourite lectures of the last year was by Nina Snaith on her work on the fascinating connection between the Riemann Hypothesis, an unsolved problem about the distribution of prime numbers, and chaotic quantum systems. (You can find out more in her LMS popular lecture.) We saw Snaith's talk at It all adds up, the London Mathematical Society's 2015 Women in Maths conference. (You can read more about the conference here.)
It all adds up was co-organised by one of our favourite mathematical friends, Vicky Neale, herself a great mathematical speaker who can enthral audiences of all ages and backgrounds. To see how, watch her introduce 7 things you need to know about prime numbers.
Enjoy!