Educators From The United Kingdom

"This technology is used all the time now. If you have a CD player, then you're using that technology. ...[O]n the CD you put lots of extra information to make sure that when you play the CD it doesn't get distorted or destroyed. [Error correcting codes... store the numbers... and other data... such that any errors can not only be detected but corrected. They work by asking extra questions to make the answers as different as possible so we can still tell the right answer even if it has mistakes in it.] This technology... was invented by a marvelous American mathematician working at Bell Labs... Hamming, one of my heroes, a fantastic mathematician, a brillian inventor of... error correcting codes [using... ()], which he used to send all the information... essentially he created the mobile phone and the internet technology which could which could send the information around... But... it goes back even further... to a branch of math called Galois theory... invented at the end of the nineteenth century by a guy aged 19, and Galois's stuff is heavily used in modern technology now."

"So this is error correcting, which brings us right up to date with the information age, sending huge amounts of information around the world, sending stuff around with Google. Absolutely fantastic."

"Mathematicians have changed the world."

"What is often called pure math, which is maths developed for interests only, suddenly finds applications in remarkable ways and leads to whole new technologies. Google was invented by two mathematicians who are now very wealthy. Let that be a lesson to us all."

"[T]here are incredibly exciting times ahead and the great thing is that there is going to be young people driving us forward, and I can't wait to see where we get to next."

"For the last 20+ years, Dr. Budd has run a module at the University of Bath designed to help undergraduate students communicate mathematics to broader audiences while providing mathematics masterclasses to young aspiring mathematicians at the Royal Institution."

"[E]ven in his academic work it is clear that Budd enjoys breaking out of the university bubble and getting his hands dirty in the real world, working on problems that he hopes can "benefit society directly"."

"Various things happened in 1917. We had the Russian Revolution, the Great War was going on in Europe, and America came in on the side of the allies... and so a lot of people were being injured, and they had s... Madame Curie was driving... an ambulance X-raying people. ...You could see some detail, but not very much, and it was realized that Radon's [object] formula... if it could be made to work, could turn an X-ray into a really good image that could show you what was going on. ...[T]hey didn't have the technology to do that. You had to wait 50 years for computers to be powerful enough to use that, and a company called EMI with a guy called Cormack developed the computers... the scanner... and that was the first scanning device. ...[T]he scanner that relies totally on Radon's formula, with a lot of other stuff. Cormack got the , quite rightly, for doing that. So that's all based on math. ...Medical imaging has utterly transformed medicine, hugely reliant on maths. ...[I]t's an area I work in myself."

"On the whole, mathematicians don't have a particularly great image."

"View #1 about math: Math is completely useless. Another one... Mathematicians are evil, soulless geeks... [A]nother... everyone seems to believe: All mathematicians are mad! ...Unfortunately, they are views quite commonly held."

"[S]ome people are... quite frightened of math, or even... suspicious of math."

"[T]he shame about all of this is not only is it not true. It's really, really, really not true! ...Math is basically the basis of the modern world. The modern world would simply not exist without mathematics."

"The technology that we celebrate today, everything we do, is all heavily based on math. In my pocket I have my ... absolutely stuffed full of mathematics, and lots of mathematicians work in the smart phone industry."

"Much of industry has problems which can potentially be formulated and solved using mathematics. ...It's numbers. It's information. It's mathematics."

"If there wasn't air around me, I'd die very very quickly... and math is like that for technology. Take the math away, the technology fails, but just like the air around us it's invisible, and lots of people don't know it's there."

"I'm going to show a picture of a mathematician... that has changed your life profoundly more than anyone I could possibly think of. ...Whilst I'm a great admirer of Washington and Franklin and... all these wonderful people, I reckon this guy's changed your life even more... This is Maxwell, but... most audiences haven't a clue who this is."

"The was... one of the first scientific research establishments in the U.K. ...They reckon about 30 elements were discovered in the Royal Institution. A number of s came out of the Royal Institution. Humphry Davy worked in the Royal Institution, the Braggs William Henry and Lawrence]... [etc.,] but possibly the most famous... was... Michael Faraday... [H]e discovered experimentally the link between electricity and magnetism and... essentially invented the and the , and those have then been developed by people like Edison and Tesla into the power generation system we so celebrate today."

"Faraday... wasn't a mathematician and so he relied on other people to do his math... and Maxwell... took Faraday's experimentally derived results, and... turned them into mathematical equations.{{center|1=\nabla \times \mathbf{E} = -\frac{\partial \mathbf{B}}{\partial t} - \mathbf{M}, \quad \nabla \times \mathbf{H} = -\frac{\partial \mathbf{D}}{\partial t} + \mathbf{J}, \nabla \cdot \mathbf{D} = \rho, \quad \nabla \cdot \mathbf{B} = 0.}} ...and these are called Maxwell's equations, and if you go to Edinburgh and you see his statue, on the base of the statue you will see these equations... which link electricity \mathbf{E} with \mathbf{B} and \mathbf{M}, which are magnetism, and \mathbf{J} is current, and \rho is charge, and these are... vector operations, and that's a derivative. ...Maxwell ...took those equations and looked for solutions, and... discovered that there were solutions... where you have an electric wave and a magnetic wave... paired... and traveling together, and he worked out the speed of those waves... exactly the speed of light. ...[I]n those equations he unified electricity, magnetism and optics all in one setup."

"But then he did something which mathematicians can do... [i.e.,] what-if experiments. You can say... what if these equations have other solutions, and he found... waves with the same speed as light, but a different and than light... and we now call them radio waves. ...Maxwell discovered radio by pure mathematics alone. It was later... that... Hertz found them experimentally, and... later... Marconi and others took the theory and turned it into practical means of communication."

"But it all started with Maxwell. Let's think where we'd be without radio. We wouldn't have radio... ... TV... ... our s, we wouldn't have microwave cookers. The world would be utterly different without radio! In fact, the modern world simply would not exist without radio waves, and it was Maxwell who discovered them, purely from mathematics, and... very, very few people know who he is. This guy should be on the bank notes... It took us a long time to get his statue up. ...One of the other things he's... noted for is his work in . He essentially invented color photography. He also wrote poetry... He was a... very good guy."

"Who was the most famous female mathematician? ...Emmy Noether, [was an] excellent... fantastic mathematician, but if I went into the street, who would know Emmy Noether? ...Even more famous than Marie Curie. Films have been made about this woman. Ada Lovelace... famous, but not as famous as this one. I've seen films, books have been written about her. Hugely famous, most children would know her name. I'm going to put her picture up and it's going to surprise you. ...Florence Nightingale's an incredibly famous woman because... she basically founded modern nursing. ...The story ...she was sent to Crimea and... set up hospitals... which saved huge number of lives, and when she went back to England she developed modern nursing and her practice... are used all over the world, and everyone thinks she's a nurse, but... she was a . She was one of the first members of the and was a really good statistician... [T]he way she cured people wasn't so much through medical care. It's through the... more modern approach, which was to try to work out what was causing people to be ill. ...[S]he gathered loads and loads of data on this and... produced graphs of this data... essentially to convey what she was doing to politicians, because politicians then and sadly now, don't know what numbers are... [S]o she did this through graphical information and she developed... rose diagrams which are very like pie charts... [S]o she not only developed ... she also developed graphical presentation of data, which is universal, and she's incredibly famous, but noone knows she was a mathematician. ...The Royal Statistical Society ...building is called the Nightingale building, after her."

"The way maths is used... has... changed enormously, essentially in my own lifetime. ...The whole thing has changed remarkably, largely because of the develoopment of computers."

"So... [who needs math?] Thirty years ago [traditional industrial users] typically using mathematics... [were] telecommunications, the aircraft industry [aerospace], power generation, oil, iron and steel, weather forecasting... a big user since the 1920s, security-code breaking... and of course, finance."

"But nowadays mathematicians are... using maths in a far far broader capacity. One of the biggest users of mathematics, certainly in the U.S., is the ... because if you have something like Shrek... What he is, is a whole load of mathematical formulae inside a computer which some mathematicians come up with... constructed to produce a shape which looks like an , and they've done a great job... So Pixar employs loads of mathematicians... [T]he film industry, a massive user of mathematics!"

"One of my other talks... is about the math in The Lord of the Rings and all the maths that was used for that, because... they used lots of mathematicians there."

"So film, entertainment, graphic design, the retail industry uses lots of mathematicians. When you go and buy something... sadly, they're collecting data... If you go to Amazon and... buy a book, it will say, "People who bought this book also were interested in this!" ...[T]here's a mathematical algorithm that's doing that. ...It's great news for young people, because... there's vast numbers of jobs, if you stick with the maths."

"The way you... deal with... a problem from industry is you take all the math that you know... and you try and solve the problems with it. ...[A]fter a while you find that you've run out of math. The math that you've learned isn't enough to... solve the problem. So...you have to... invent new math, and... that new math can be... abstracted and turned into other stuff, and then... used to solve new problems, and... you look at those new problems and... find that you need new math from that... and so it... cascades, with problems generating maths, generating problems, and so on. ...[I]t's a really good virtuous circle, and this is... how math is developed over many years."

"Math is also developed by curiosity, and just pure abstract reasoning as well, so there's lots of ways it works."

"I'm going to take you through this, looking at the way history of the way math has impacted our civilization. ...I'll try and take you right up to where we are at the moment, and beyond."

"Where did math come from? ...Early people counted on their fingers, and numbers basically came from that. ...There's no other reason for choosing ten. Ten isn't a great number for a base. Very few numbers divide into it. If we had 12 fingers we would have been better..."

"The ians were a little... more advanced. They used the knuckles as well. They counted not only in 10s but in 60s... and that's why we have 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 360 degrees in a circle."

"Math was... invented to count things with. What was it then used for? ...Once you have numbers 1,2,3,4,5, and 6... and you want to start using them, you... find they're not useful for everything. You have to invent... more numbers... to include things like 0... invented around the year 0, and negative numbers were invented to deal with things like debt, and s were invented... I suppose you've got 3 fields and... 5 children, then each child will inherit 3/5 of a field. So they were invented to deal with that."

"Taxonomic systems of the past—particularly those found in , biology, and geology—are now seen to be one of the most important resources for understanding the interconnections of science and culture."

"Darwin was a traveler, a family man, a thinker, a much-loved husband, father, friend, and neighbor—a likeable and genial figure, as expressive in his letters as he must have been in life. Although his theories were first conceived in the smoky atmosphere of London, just after his return from the in 1836, his major books and articles were all researched and constructed in the domestic setting of his home at in Kent. There he lived for 40 years with his wife Emma Wedgwood and 10 children, of whom only seven survived to adulthood. The house still exists and is now a museum restored to show how it was in Darwin’s time. It is an inspiring place to visit, quiet and rural, and one can almost imagine Darwin stepping in through a doorway. Visitors used to record how he would greet them with an outstretched hand."

"The great majority of British naturalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in fact considered foreign organisms much more exciting and interesting than those found at home. This is not to say that local natural history suffered: David Allen's important book describing the Naturalist in Britain indicates the wealth of popular interest in animals and plants and the depth of knowledge relating to British organisms ... Yet the inexhaustible lure of travel and the anticipated pleasures of foreign lands, both mental, moral, and physical, were important components in the history of this subject. Excitement, change, and the thrill of difference were integral emotional factors in the growth of British interest in biogeographical topics—indeed crucial as the relaxed aura of eighteenth-century social life metamorphosed into a strait-laced Victorian era. Nevertheless, a love for natural history and a desire to travel were in no way sufficient reasons to account for the increase of overseas activitiy among naturalists. Far more significant was the hierarchical structure of British society and expansionist national ethos."

"When I first started having a Saturday job, the way you were disciplined was you'd have a little kind of clocking on card that you stamped and it registered the time you arrived at work and the time that you left work, and it was very kind of clear really what you were selling was your labour for a certain number of hours. Now with unconscious bias training, it almost feels as if what you're selling is your soul, quite literally. You know, it's your thoughts, it's your unconscious that the bosses have control over and have access to. And I think this kind of equality, diversity, inclusion, environmental, social, governance agenda, you know it's a very useful tool for the kind of capitalist class, if you like, to regulate themselves, relate to eachother and I think, most importantly, to be able to discipline the workforce."

"For an activity to qualify as an instance of independent learning it must exhibit learner control over the direction of learning efforts, even if this is temporarily submerged in order to acquire specific skills."

"The independent learners in the sample surveyed were seen to adopt a number of possible learning styles, to engage in a planning of intermediate and terminal learning goals; to generate subjective and objective indices of evaluation and to devise patterns of problem solving. They were adept at using existing information sources to their advantage and created learning networks of fellow enthusiasts for the exchange of advice and information."

"As the Indian sages pondered on the problem of good and evil, they were confronted with the apparent injustices and cruelties of the world around them, and this state of affairs was finally reconciled with their idea of Brahman by the conception of a universal ethical law applymg to all life. This law as proclaimed as the law of karma. In the words of the Upanishads, "As is a man's desire so is his will, and 1\S is his will so is his deed, and whatever deed he does that he will reap." "India held a strange and irresistible attraction for the whole of Asia in the first millennium. People in the most primitive stage of development as well as the Chinese with a civilization as ancient and illustrious as India's own, acknowledged India as first in the supreme realm of spiritual perception. Yet the civilization of India, transplanted abroad, did not have a deadening effect of suppressing or stifling native genius, as the imposition of a foreign culture often does. On the contrary, it called out the best that others had to give.As a result of India's fertilizing influence, new and distinctive types of culture everywhere arose, and each new colony was able to create and contribute fresh treasure, to be added to the great Asiatic heritage. How Indian religions and Indian culture blossomed anew in foreign environments and endured for many centuries is a fascinating and little appreciated chapter of Indian history." ... "The Indian colonies which began to grow up all along the periphery of the motherland were essentially cultural and religious, rather than political or racial. Yet they were subject to strong Indian influences. These swept outward like tidal waves. They passed south to Sri Lanka and beyond to the remote islands of the Pacific. They inundated Burma, Malaya, Siam and Indo-China. They overwhelmed Nepal and Tibet. From Afghanistan, they passed along to central Asia and China. They lapped at the far shores of Korea and Japan. Indian religious ideas and literature, Indian conventions of art and architecture, Indian legal codes and social practices ... all took root in these outer territories." "For a long time Indians seem to have held the monopoly of maritime commerce in both the southern and eastern seas of Asia. They possessed large ocean-going vessels, in which they first ventured to Sri Lanka, Burma, Malaya and gradually they extended their journeys to Java and Sumatra and then to southern China."

"The most profound and revolutionary statement on the nature of reality, which mankind has as yet made."

"The Russian Revolution's impact on sections of the and the rise of the Labour Party profoundly disturbed important sections of the Conservative right and it was in these circles that first came into existence in 1923, when , who had served in the Women's Reserve Ambulance during the war, formed the , subsequently the British Fascists (BFs). Set up to oppose a feared communist uprising, the British Fascists organised in paramilitary units and was eventually to split during the 1926 General Strike over the government's insistence that the the British Fascists would have to drop the military structure before their assistance could be accepted in breaking the strike. An earlier split had taken away some of the most militant members, while the 1926 split deprived it of elements who prioritised anti-socialism over any specifically fascist affiliation. Later in the 1920s, yet another group, the , would bring together elements convinced that the BFs, rather than being truly fascist, had failed to break decisively with conservatism."