Mathematics Today

Editorial

Leadership is a tricky concept to pin down. I sit on many interview panels for senior positions and questions around leadership are invariably on the agenda. People respond in different ways. Some have a clear understanding of what leadership is all about (which may or may not correspond with mine). Others recognise its importance but aren’t particularly good at articulating what it means. A small percentage pay lip service to the concept – they expect to be asked but don’t really have a clear grasp of why it is relevant to them or to the role they are seeking to fill. But I don’t think any interviewee has ever told me that they don’t think leadership is important.

Nearly 50 scientists, industry experts, academics and students had their first glimpse of the world leading Orion laser facility when the delegation gathered at the IMA Employers’ Forum, hosted by AWE Aldermaston on 4 March 2013.
 

Mathematics 2013 Conference

Mathematics 2013, the continuation of the series of annual one day conferences on mathematics and its applications took place on 14 March. It was again held at Mary Ward House in Tavistock Place, London.
 

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Another Way of Thinking: A Review of Mathematical Models of Crime

Mathematical models are useful weapons in the crime-fighting arsenal. With the development of cheaper and more powerful computers, mathematical modelling of systems representing some aspect of crime or criminal behaviour and the analysis of the resulting numerical solutions is becoming more popular. Models may be used to guide decision-making, develop policies or to evaluate specific strategies aimed at reducing crime. This review provides an introduction to some relatively recent mathematical models of crime.

Editorial

I hope that some of you had the chance to see David Spiegelhalter’s entertaining programme Tails You Win: the science of chance that was broadcast originally in October 2012 on that beacon of TV excellence which is BBC4. Spiegelhalter is the Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge and, as befits anyone with that title in the modern age, he maintains an excellent blog (http://understandinguncertainty.org).

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The Benefits of Chartership

A recent (2012) independent report by consulting firm Deloitte, commissioned by the UK government has shown that: 10 per cent of UK jobs and 16 per cent (£208 billion) of Gross Value Added to the UK economy stem from mathematical sciences research.

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Mathematics of the Fluid Earth

The interaction between Earth sciences and mathematics has been for a long time a very stimulating one for both disciplines. Indeed, on the one hand, the phenomenology of the fluid and solid Earth and of the Earth ecological systems has provided the basic inspiration leading to the birth of entire mathematical areas such as those related to chaos, fractals, catastrophe theory (see an example of a climate tipping point in Figure 1), extreme events theory, and multi-scale processes. On the other hand, mathematical tools developed in these areas, as well as in fields such as ordinary and partial differential equations, dynamical systems, signal processing, stochastic calculus, statistical mechanics, taken together with the understanding of the underlying physical, chemical, and biological processes, have immensely increased the predictive and descriptive power of Earth sciences. Since World War II, scientific calculus has been especially relevant for bridging mathematics and Earth sciences and providing tools of practical applicability for an ever-increasing range of applications of great societal importance.

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CliMathNet

Living as we do in the Rossby wave surf zone (as Professor Michael McIntyre has memorably called it) the weather of the UK is constantly a source of news and interest. As I write, warm Atlantic air is in a battle with cold polar air to decide who gets snow dumped on them and who does not! But the climate is so much more than the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere and ocean - it is affected by long-term interactions and feedback between all sorts of chemical species and factors, from carbon cycle and anthropogenic greenhouse gases to solar variability, evolution and ecology. Mathematical problems range from predicting the behaviour of coupled nonlinear systems to the problems of understanding remote sensing data. As the mother of all complex systems it is very topical as we are now several months into the year of ‘Mathematics for Planet Earth 2013’ – readers of Mathematics Today will already know from February’s MPE special issue.

Mathematics for Planet Earth Editorial

The year 2013 has been dedicated as a special year for the Mathematics of Planet Earth (http://mpe2013.org/), by a worldwide network of mathematical research institutes,
university departments, mathematical societies and other types of partner, including the IMA.

Mathematics to Anticipate Earth Futures

We live in challenging and anxious times. Human society is ever more interconnected on a global scale and in many areas, such as health, quality of life and prosperity, the human condition continues to improve for most people. However, we are also acutely aware that there are less comfortable trends such as an unsustainable rate of population growth, increases in inequality, deterioration of the environment, a persistent billion or so people who remain in extreme poverty, increase in natural disasters, increasing scarcity of natural resources, and unprecedented loss of species and habitats.

Multiple Stable States and Regime Shifts in Ecological Systems

Ecological systems at many scales can exhibit multiple stable states and the possibility of regime shifts. These shifts are relatively well understood for a variety of specific systems which are amenable to description by simple mathematical models. Using the insights from these simple models as a bridge to understanding regime shifts in more complex systems raises substantial mathematical and ecological challenges to determine approaches which should help guide both management and adaptation in the face of global change.

The Mathematics of Vaccination

Vaccination is one of the major medical advances of the 20th century. Although vaccination was scientifically investigated by Edward Jenner in the late 18th century, it was not until the biochemical advances of the 20th century that cheap, safe vaccines could be produced in large quantities. Vaccination is a powerful tool in the public-health control arsenal, and allows for the mass prevention of infection rather than treating the symptoms of infection. Vaccination saves thousands of lives each year in the UK alone.

Editorial

IMA Employers' Forum

The first IMA Employers’ Forum, hosted by EDF Energy, was held on 18 September 2012. The subject of the meeting was Employability of Mathematics Graduates, and the aim of the meeting was to bring together stakeholders, including representatives from industry and academia, to facilitate an exchange of views and the sharing of good practice.

IMA Supports Practising Teachers to ICME-12

 The Optimal Dartboard?