Christmas Lectures
Yesterday I went to see a couple of Christmas lectures with my school. There was both a maths and a chemistry lecture. Both lectures were pretty good and they definitely made me look forward to what university might be like. Of course it is hard to tell because they covered some of the more fun content.
The chemistry was in the morning and was done by a couple of chemists from Southampton University. They did plenty of fun experiments. They started off with cryogenics so they had the dry and and liquid nitrogen to freeze things with. They lit a balloon full of oxygen and helium to show us a fast reaction which was pretty loud. Also they showed us some things which glowed. You really need to see things like this to appreciate them though, my description definitely doesn’t do them justice.
The Maths lecture was by David Acheson from Jesus College, Oxford. His talk was really interesting, he showed us some interesting proofs and little mathematical tricks. He has a website which has some of the things that he showed us on it. The programs that he has on there are quite fun to look at and fairly informative. He also plays the guitar and so he played a bit to us, he says that otherwise he wouldn’t get to play it to anybody.
Just to finish off here are a couple of the puzzles that he gave us to do over the interval. They are fairly common puzzles so you may have heard them before.
What is the value of sqrt(1+sqrt(1+sqrt(1+…))) with the square roots going on to infinity. The answer is best left in surd form since then it si clear you haven’t just used a pocket calculator.
If a spider is in the corner of a 1×1x1 cube and the spider wishes to reach the opposite corner how long is the shortest route. The spider can walk anywhere on a surface but cannot fly.