Welcome to the Talking Maths in Public podcast, which is a community podcast for the TMiP network. TMiP is for anyone who does maths communication, with a conference every two years and an active chat group in between. My name's Katie Steckles, and I'm a maths speaker and writer and member of the TMiP committee. The podcast is a chance for members of the community to share their maths communication work and talk about the ways we communicate maths. In this episode, we'll hear the first half of an interview with maths communicator Rob Eastaway about his career in mathematical writing and his work on the Maths Inspiration Project. We'll also hear from a maths and neuroscience crossover project, and chat to some science communication researchers about the idea of maths capital. To see the links to things discussed in this episode and find more episodes, you can visit talkingmathsinpublic.uk/podcast. --- First up, we asked maths author and consultant Colin Beveridge to interview Rob Eastaway, the author of a string of popular maths books about his career so far, including creating the Maths Inspiration theatre shows, and unexpectedly designing the ranking system for cricket. I'm here with Rob Eastaway, who is one of the country's most influential maths communicators - as an author, a speaker, and as director of Maths Inspiration, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. Welcome, Rob. Lovely to be with you, Colin. Thank you for that nice introduction. Very welcome. So can you tell us a bit about Maths Inspiration, what it is, what you're trying to accomplish with it, how it got started? Maths Inspiration, it- to summarize what it is, it's a series of theatre-based interactive lecture shows. That's the phrase we use. The idea is, every other subject has a field trip. Why shouldn't maths be able to go on a trip out to enrich themselves on the subject? And in this case, these are lecture shows held in big theatres for 16, 17 year olds. And it's given us an excuse actually to do maths shows in some fantastic venues - West End- London West End Theatres, the Bristol Hippodrome, the Leeds Playhouse. Many of us could say, "yeah, done the Leeds Playhouse", sound like real lovies, but but it all started just over 20 years ago, when a few of us would get asked occasionally to do talks at big six form events, but they were always in London. They were quite expensive and tended to be dominated by affluent schools turning up. And so the initial idea actually was Simon Singh and I, who both did the events like that thought it'd be nice to do something out of London. Let's go to Manchester. And we found a venue which was linked with the university. It was like a student halls or whatever, and we did an event there. It went fine, but it was hot and sticky and unatmospheric, and my mind went back to my very little theatre experience, which was doing a pantomime. When I was in my early twenties, (Colin: Oh no you weren't!) producing [..] my employer and I remember, treading the boards and being in a theatre and thinking what an atmosphere there is in a theatre - maybe we could do maths shows in a theatre. So the next year, which is 2004, I approached the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester and said, "Could we do a show, a theatre show in your venue", which is in the round. Of course, it's a lecture show with a screen, we could only do it in the semicircle. But but anyway, they said yes. And that started our tradition of doing shows in theatres. And the idea was to just show teenagers that there's more to maths than taking exams. And the very first presenters on that included Colin Wright, who's been doing Maths Inspiration shows ever since. Everyone, I'm sure, listening to this will know Colin and his juggling act. It goes back way beyond 2004, but it's as slick today as it always was. And Claire Ellis, who worked on the Enigma project, was also involved in that very first show. So there we are. It was to try and just show some different sides of maths and make it not a maths lecture, but much more engaging and entertaining, fun, but also with proper good content. So that's really where it came from and we've expanded to we do typically about 15 or 20 shows a year and well over 10,000 teenagers come to shows each year. So we're well over 250,000 have come to our shows now. That's amazing. So you mentioned entertaining people with maths. That's- that's a big theme in all of your work, but particularly in How Many Socks Make a Pair. So do you have any neat mathematical bits of entertainment you can share with us or surprises? Yes, so it's funny, that was one of my favorite books that I produced, which became How Many Socks Make a Pair, and I wanted to call it "Ah, Aha, and Haha", the the sort of funny and curious side of maths, but my publisher talked me out of that and said make it about everyday things. But I remember that is the book where I introduced what at the time was very little known - no one had come across the dragon curve: the idea that you take a strip of paper And just fold it in half and keep folding it in half, boringly, right over left. And you would think what shape's going to come out of that? It's going to be some kind of squiggly rectangle thing. And it's not. It's this most exotic fractal. And to me, that was the most extreme example of how something so mundane can create something so amazingly beautiful. So that, in a way, summed up many of the sort of ideas that I thought were out there. What's really interesting is now, there's a generation, thanks partly to Numberphile and everybody else who know a lot about dragon curves. Although there's many of us do, of course, the vast majority of the population still don't know about dragon curves and are still surprised. And that's, that can be the situation with the sort of TMiP network, we forget that whilst things are familiar to us, there are the vast majority of people are still to be exposed to things like the "birthday paradox", in quotes. Which was another thing that appeared in How Many Socks Make a Pair and that I went into in more detail. There's a brilliant XKCD comic called The Ten Thousand. So there's something that everybody knows, but there are people who don't know it yet. And on average, there's 10,000 people a day must learn that thing. And so it's "Hey, you're one of today's 10,000. I'm going to show you this thing." Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. That's a good principle that. Exactly. So I know you're a keen cricketer. For those of us those of you listening, Rob was one of the key movers behind creating the international rankings of cricketers in the 1980s, and you somehow find some time to improve access to the sport. Can you tell us a bit about your work there? Okay. Not a health warning exactly, but I'm very conscious that immediately the mention of the word cricket, it just by the fact that it's become such a minority sport, risks 80 percent of people at this point saying "that's it. I'm switching off". So to those people, please do not switch off - because in a way, I'm going to link all of this back to talking maths in public, that it's like a metaphor for that. So if you're thinking, "Oh my god, cricket - boring, I've never understood it. I feel intimidated by it. What's the point?" Remember, these are all questions that people are asking about maths. So any of those feelings you have: good, channel those and think "well, okay, so what has got to happen with cricket to make me care about cricket?" And the answer is, like, no one could be forced to like anything at all, but you care a bit more when you understand and and you have some personal involvement and everything else. As a cricket lover since childhood, because my dad was an Australian, I just inherited it. It was part of my family culture. And it's a very numbery sport too. And, cricket lovers will say that we're different from other sports because we embrace the joy of numbers and charts and beautiful coincidences, it's part of the love of the game. It's not like baseball, for example, which seems to be - probably a very unfair view of baseball - which seems to be a little bit more just "stats for the sake of stats", and without that critical humor thing. But anyway I had the amazing good fortune when I was in my early 20s, my first job basically to get an email, or no, it wasn't an email, no emails in those days, got a letter from a guy called Ted Dexter, who was a hugely influential guy in the cricket world, to say "I've got this idea for producing world rankings for cricket". "I've seen an article you've written about. Computer simulations of cricket. Maybe you can help me". And I got involved in a project of, yeah, writing a mathematical model to rank cricketers, to rank people in a team sport individually, which of course has all sorts of controversy linked with it, but also technical challenges. How do you extract individual performance out of a team thing? And we produced a mathematical model. And I think that the key lesson from that, from a maths point of view, is that we were producing something that was going to, inflict it on the general public, and still is to this day. And the general public thinking how does this work? And who's behind it? And so on. And it was a very, a baptism of fire in communicating maths and realising actually, that you have to do good maths behind it, but most people don't - it's a combination that they don't care, and they don't want to know, all they want to know is that it works. They don't want to know how it works. If it produces some ranking where their favourite player is not in the top ten, they're going to just dismiss the entire methodology, whether it works or not. So I did an awful lot of trying to explain to journalists the maths behind this and some of the factors of exponential decay and so on. I quickly learned that some of this language just, in a way I was digging my own hole with it because they're going, "that proves, who could possibly understand this". But it's also by having that project, it's given me fantastic opportunities elsewhere. So that's the sort of- the cricket thing I have been doing basically since my 20s. And and I continue to do, and then I play cricket as well. And cricket can be quite exclusive as a sport in that if you're not very good at it, who's ever going to want to get tempted to go and play cricket? When you might get shown up and is this hard ball being flung down or whatever. So I've tended to play friendly cricket, and friendly cricket, it's really important to make people feel like they're - however good or bad they are - they're taking part. And it's all to do with captaincy and so on. Anyway we've got a little charity that we run that helps support friendly cricket, which is this kind of stuff where when you drop a catch, your friends laugh with you rather than at you, really. But again, there are sort of analogies with the whole maths communication thing that people who feel intimidated, they feel they're going to feel stupid. They don't feel they're as good as you. How can you make them feel? It's okay to be whatever level they're at without them feeling patronised and without them feeling, like they're inferior in some way. So this is a thing for you. This is a thing that you can do at whatever level you're at. And it's partly, cricket is like maths. It's easier when you're surrounded by people who are roughly at your level, or those who are much better but keep it well hidden. And everyone has a chance to be a hero in a cricket game - if you're a hopeless batter and you go in last, you can still swish and snick the ball, it goes past the keeper, still get a run and everyone loves you for it, or you can stop the ball and chuck it in and it's a runner. All of that is- is great. And, those who have been to things like MathsJam, there is that sort of spirit in a maths- in a good MathsJam, which is like that. So you talked a lot there about the intimidation that people feel about both maths and cricket and you work to overcome that in both things. So you wrote Maths for Mums and Dads with Mike Askew. Can you talk a bit about the reaction you got to that? Yeah, Maths for Mums and Dads was really, it was a breakthrough book in terms of, it was the first book I'd written that really was being read by people who don't normally read maths books. And of course, the reason is, as parents of primary children, they were at their wits end saying, my kid can't do maths, I can't help them. And part of the problem is, all this language that had appeared in maths that they'd never heard of. Most parents had never heard of number bonds, which is a term casually thrown around in primary classrooms about numbers that add together to make 10 - number bonds. The trouble is this a lot of this becomes like jargon, it becomes exclusive, and that comes back to what we were just talking about. So really, as a parent of three kids, and someone who's into maths, I identified very much with the- even I am struggling with some of the stuff that they're learning at school. Mike Askew who I wrote it with was actually the expert who understood a lot more about why children get things wrong. And so we were able to collaborate together to produce a book that had just parent after parent say, ah, at last, this is what, just what I needed. We had a fantastic reaction to that. People would stop me in the street and say, "ah, I've got your book. This is fabulous". It was really pleasurable project and it sold incredibly well, because so many people in that situation saying, "we just need somebody to explain to us from our point of view, what's going on with maths". Does seven eights still equal 56? Are you even allowed to use long division anymore? And, the answer is "yes, you are", but sometimes, it's implied there's only one way you're allowed to do things. Yes Yeah, I struggle with that, that you have to do it exactly this way, rather than thinking about what you're doing or trying to understand the different ways you could attack this problem. I think it stifles a bit. So you talk there about making things approachable to all sorts of audiences. Do you have any secrets about how you do that? Because this is one of the things I admire about your writing is that you're, you make it friendly. Yeah, it's an interesting question. I do what I do. And I suppose I've always tried to be like that, but I suppose there's a few things that are the raw edges of what I do. Not least the very first job I went into was very jargon driven. I was working for a, company called Deloitte's. That was my first significant job. And you just feel very intimidated by corporate jargon, all these people. And then you suddenly realize hang on a sec. But I'm, I understand what I'm doing here. And I don't need that jargon. And when I have the confidence to confront them back in plain English, they talk plain English back to me. So I've always, sort of, I've had increased confidence in just saying people like plain English as long as you're not oversimplifying a subject. That's the mistake you can make. That's the mistake I've sometimes made is just oversimplifying it in order to make it so accessible you're not actually making the point. But- but in terms of tips, I was given a tip from my sort of teenage times when I was, I precociously got into this world as a puzzle setter for New Scientist of all things. But my dad would read what I'd written and say I don't understand this. He'd give me really critical feedback. And ever since, just giving what you've written to someone who's your target audience and asking them for feedback and being ready to accept their feedback. It's a horrible thing when they say, I really hate this, or I don't understand a word of this, or this is really pompous or whatever, because you want to defend yourself. And not my job to defend myself. You're the reader. If that's how you feel, that is the view of the audience. And it's my problem, not your problem. But for adult corporate reports, the rule was write this such that an intelligent 13 year old would understand it. And and so similarly for doing maths stuff, try it out on the internet. Try it out on someone intelligent and articulate, who's not your audience, and see what they say, because they'll, and someone who's prepared to be honest, and I do, when I write things, tend to have a rule these days, of having two types of audience. A person to test it out on one is the person who's very supportive who I know will say good things and nice things because you need somebody to say nice things just to feel like you've not wasted your time. But the other end of this spectrum, give it to someone who just doesn't suffer fools gladly and is happy to just, give it to you straight and tell you it's rubbish. But it's good to, to go to them second after you've had the positive feedback from the first people. But that's really good. And I've got a couple of friends who are really good at just telling me as it is. And I always feel bad at the end of that, but I think I needed to go through that because if you didn't tell me then someone else was going to tell me further down the line. Yeah. I think it's useful to have that coming from someone friendly. And then you can fix it and you make it better before it goes out to the real wolves. Yes, I should say by the way, and I'm not quite sure where you, Colin Beveridge, sit in this spectrum, but everyone out there should have Colin in mind as as one of the people to give feedback - because you provide some of the best, most rigorous feedback. And actually the ultimate, the best feedback of all is the stuff where you spot things that no one else has spotted. And you add value where you say not only. Is this bit maybe wrong, but you could say this instead. You could add this. I think, wow, it's fantastic when someone does that extra bit for you. So there we are. A much needed plug for your excellent work. Thank you. Cheque is in the post. While we're flattering each other, I think my, my favorite Rob Eastaway book is Maths on the Back of an Envelope. It's about Fermi estimation, working things out approximately. So what's the best bit of approximating you've ever done? Ah so yeah, I've I do think. estimation is such an important skill. I love doing it. I love doing it for fun and filming stuff. I quite often get invited onto the Radio 4 podcast More or Less, and they often ask me to do back of envelope estimations there. And I think my favorite one of many favorites was when they asked me to estimate how much jam there is in the world. And I, I did all the calculations and I had a sort of a-ha moment. just towards the end of doing all the calculations, which, just, I thought, how can we turn this from a "so what" story into something with a nice ending? And it turned out, I went to my map to find somewhere that was the approximate area Of the amount, spreading this jam at right thickness. And Cornwall turned out to be the place with the right area. We're able to finish off by saying there's enough jam to smear, at two millimeters thickness over the whole of Cornwall. You've got enough cream and you can have- you can have the big- world's biggest cream tea. Except, I think, Yes, that's right, you put the jam down first, you smear Cornwall with jam first, and then you put the cream on top, am I right? Whereas in Devon it would be the other way around. Love it. --- To hear the second half of Rob and Colin's chat, you'll need to wait until next month. Next up, we'll hear about a project that mashes up maths puzzles and brain scanners to produce an exciting interactive stall at a music festival. Here's science podcaster Eva Higginbotham talking to Maths City's Max Hughes. All right, Max, introduce yourself. So I'm Max. I am the coordinator of Maths City Leeds, which means I spend every day surrounded by puzzles. How about you Eva? So I'm Eva Higginbotham. I'm a podcast producer actually, so I spend my time making podcasts, but at heart I'm a neuroscientist. So I have a PhD in neuroscience and I like to make science podcasts as well. So we're here to talk about a project that we worked on together during the summer that was super fun and involved. Both maths and neuroscience. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the project? So this was a project at Green Man Festival in Wales and it was called Mind Games, your Brain on Puzzles. So a bunch of neuroscientists and mathematicians teamed up to scan people's brains whilst they were doing mathematical puzzles, which was a very exciting, It was super exciting and we actually recorded a little bit of audio while we were there so you can get a flavor for what it was like. - All right, Max, where are we? So we are in the middle of the beautiful Brecon Beacons in Wales, in Einstein's Garden in Greenland Festival. So we've got a tent called Mind Games, Your Brain on Puzzles, where we're having a look at your brain on puzzles, exactly. What are you thinking at the moment? How are you feeling? I'm good. We've been here for a few days. We've talked to a lot of different people. We've got some maths puzzles going on, some genius stuff. squares, some pyramids, and then we've got a brain scanner that we've been using to scan people's brains while they do a puzzle called The T puzzle. So this is one of Martin Gardner's favourite puzzles using four pieces and it's a particularly tricky one. So we had a bit of a test to start with of which of Maths City's puzzles was the best to be scanned and made possible. the best like kind of neuro response on our scanner and we found the T was the trickiest and created that kind of neuro response that was very visible compared to some of the other puzzles we had, so it was Maths City's trickiest puzzle. Excellent, yes, I actually, I got my brain scanned and it took me a really long time to do the T puzzle, but I don't think my brain really works in that sort of visual way. That said, I'm here as a neuroscientist, not as a mathematician. People have been really into the maths Which is something that I've really enjoyed. We've had so many people come up and say, Oh, I'm so glad that you're doing some maths here. I think that people can see maths obviously as something that's quite hard to engage with. If you didn't like it at school, then you don't maybe think you're going to like it as an adult. But I think you've done a really good job of finding some puzzles and ways of talking about maths that people have been into. Yeah, and I think Because you're a neuroscientist, you're finding the maths really interesting. As a mathematician, I'm finding what you're doing, along with neuroscientists, the most interesting. Because it's just, this whole kind of, we're doing outreach across two different fields, with both neuroscience and maths. I'm automatically drawn to this completely new thing for me, looking, thinking about what happens with the brain whilst we're doing puzzles. And we've also got a few 3D printed brains sitting on our tables along with the puzzles. So it's been a really good talking point with the public. We can talk them through the hat tile, they play around with the puzzles, they play around with the Genius Square. And then we have the brains there and can say, okay, so when you're doing these puzzles, actually, of course you're using your brain and this bit's the cortex and actually you're probably using your prefrontal cortex. That's the bit that helps you do really hard thinking right at the front of your brain. And then we can send the adults on to get the brain scan. So I think it's actually worked really well as It's a sort of the, it's not such a big leap to go from maths puzzles to your brain to the brain scans. Work, the flow I think has worked really quite well. Yeah, no, that's been absolutely perfect and just, as I say, I work with these puzzles every day as part of my job, and it's really nice to see them from a different light with that neuroscience element as well and, It's just inspiring, and it gives me a new lease of life on the jobs that I currently do as well. Going, this is, and I can talk about it for the next year, I can be at Maths City just saying, this is what you're, this is what's happened to your brain when you're doing the puzzle, and that's really exciting to me. That, yeah, I'm very excited to talk about it in the future. It's true, it's been such a good exchange of ideas. I didn't know anything about the hat tile, and now I've been talking to people about the hat tile all weekend, and that's been great. You've been doing a really good job as well, like you're an expert, you're a maths expert. Yes I want that. Preserved for posterity. Eva Higginbotham is now an official maths expert, according to Max Hughes, who is a genuine maths expert. All right, thanks so much, Max. I think we better get back to the stall. Yeah, sounds good. - It's nice, because you can actually really get a feel for the atmosphere while we were there, which was super like welcoming and exciting and you can hear the music in the background a little bit. It was lovely. Wasn't it? Yeah, it was beautiful and it was called einstein's garden We were literally in a garden surrounded by flowers, but also the main stage was just behind like a tree in the background So it was like the perfect festival atmosphere. Yeah, it was pretty idyllic so thinking about the project itself. How did we get thinking about that? Yeah. So I remember so we both do some science comedy and because of that, we're in a Slack channel. And I remember someone message saying Green Man Festival is up for proposals. You can put some proposals in to be in Einstein's garden. And you were the first person to reply saying, yes, I'm very keen. I want to do something neuroscience y. I wondered what you were thinking. Why did you jump straight in? So I actually went to Green Man maybe six years ago during my PhD. I went along with a research institute that's a part of the University of Cambridge where I did my PhD. And there, at the time, I was a developmental biology neuroscience student. And so we went along and talked to people about different kinds of cells and how they develop in the body. Yeah. So that's what really gave me the idea is I'd done it before and I was interested in doing it again, but perhaps in a different way. What about you? Yeah. So I saw your message and the other messages and I thought, how can I make this about maths? I've got amazing neuroscientists that are up for doing something. How can I get involved? And so I just literally messaged going. Can we do brain scanning with maths? Yeah, it was so lovely because the four of us all coming together to put together a project. And once we settled on that idea of the brain scanning while doing maths puzzles, we were then we were away, weren't we? Yeah. And then the real work began of making sure it was actually going to work. The scanning, as well as the funding, which is something that we're all very grateful to you for taking care of. Yeah, I suppose that was a big part of my organization. So I reached out to ICMS, so the International Center for Mathematical Sciences, and they very kindly funded us. So without them, we wouldn't have had any volunteers throughout the weekend. It would have I don't think it would have ran at all. Yeah, we were really grateful for them. I think Tracer Power helped get a battery in as well as the university of Cambridge's brain scanning equipment. So it was lots of different people helping us out and yes, we were forever grateful. And of UK as well really helped me. And it's really useful being connected to a big institution like Maths World. Like we've all, I've got that name connected to me. I've got these three people with doctorates. And I think that really helped my funding application go through because me by myself, it might be a bit harder, but free doctorates, MathsVideUK, it was fine. Yeah. We had a nice little group, a nice little group going. And as you mentioned, so we did have some volunteers with us. There were the four of us core organizers, but we brought another four along to help us run the stall. And I'd say that was probably the minimum. If we'd had a few more, actually, it might've been, Even easier with the scheduling because we were open for quite long days, quite a few days in a row, weren't we? Yeah. Nine hour days three days in a row. I know you either. Would you call yourself someone who talks maths in public very frequently? I honestly, I have to tell you, Max, I don't think I've ever talked maths in public in my life. I actually, I didn't do maths A level, so I did maths A level. Maths up to the end of GCSE and then I've got, a biology degree and then a neuroscience PhD, but in terms of maths, I feel like that's something I, I haven't engaged with really in a long time. But I found that kind of you and all the other neuroscientists were amazing at doing the communication. You just jump right into it and, listen to what the puzzles are about. And yeah, I think it made me feel like my job wasn't as skilled as I thought it was because the people who isn't their job came in and just done it perfectly. In terms of audience, we were talking to festival goers. So everyone there was someone who had chosen to come to Age wise, there was really a big range I found we had lots of kids, some really small kids who were just coming in with would push a block around for a bit or play around with the tiles to try and, like doing just a normal puzzle they might do at home all the way up to older, like genuinely elderly people as, as well who were there at the festival to have a good time. It was a really wide audience in terms of age, in terms of general demographic. What do you think? I was really surprised in general because I'd never done a festival before. This was my first music festival and the ages was a big enough surprise for me. But what I really liked talking to was people who wouldn't have came if it just said maths. So if it's because it said neuroscience, it brought some really interesting people in. So those medical professionals in particular, I had lots of good conversations with them who came in because of the brain scanning, but then I could then suddenly talk about tetrahedral numbers or aperiodic monotiles. Absolutely. I think it's true that there were some people who came along because they like brains and then there were some people who came along because they like maths and there was an often quite often people's parents, they would say to me, while the kid was getting on with whatever puzzle, they would say, Oh, she loves maths at school. And I was always like, that's lovely. I'm delighted. So would you say that we met our goals? I think so. And I don't know if that's from not having properly well defined goals to start with. We were there to have a bit of fun, to do some really good communication and I had fun and I think the communication was really good. So I met my goals. Yeah, I think, yeah, I feel the same way. I don't think I went in with any specific goal other than have a good time, talk to some interesting people. And also I think with the pandemic, I changed. I'm no longer working in academia. My job is talking to people all the time for podcasts, but I'm rarely actually face to face with a bunch of people trying to talk about science these days. And even though that's something I did loads of during my PhD. So for me, it was actually just really nice to get back out there and get Talking to people about just fun and interesting stuff that feels really real and relevant. And I just, I got a big kick out of that and felt like I'd returned a little bit to myself. I think also one of our goals that we probably didn't acknowledge at the time was, can four of us come together to create a thing? And the answer is yes. And so in that sense, we very much met our goal 'cause we realized we can do it. Yeah, I think that's a perfect ending there. --- And for our last segment, I chatted to science communication researchers Julie Moote and Jen DeWitt about their research into the concept of science capital, and how it can be applied to maths. I'm here with science, communication, science, education, researchers Julie and Jen. And we're here to talk about the idea of science capital. So I guess, first of all maybe you could go to Julie first. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your work and maybe an idea of what science capital is? Absolutely. So thanks for having us. A little North American party here today but yeah, so two North Americans in one room. So yeah, my name is Julie Moote. I started out as a science teacher in Canada. And after that decided to go back to education and kind of developed a strong interest in self regulated learning and took that into the science realm. So specifically looking at the impact of. Allowing young people to set their own goals and work toward them and how that can develop intrinsic motivation and that pulled me to the Aspires project, which is all about understanding the factors relating to young people's choices, particularly in science and STEM pathways. So I worked on the project for, I think, the better part of a decade. I've had three babies, so I've taken a slight step back to focus on family. And now with the youngest Yeah, starting her own adventures. I'm getting a little bit back into the sphere. So I'm doing some consultancy work. And yeah, it's exciting to be here today talking about our work. Yeah, the idea of Science Capital Jen will talk more to you, but came about trying to understand the factors related to young people's choices to pursue. Science and stem pathways, and it originally came up with this idea of this hold all bag with four pockets, the one being who, so those contacts you have or your parents have or family friends have people that work in and out of science, maths, engineering, technology. And it came out with our careers and work experience findings that's particularly useful when you think about work placements, if your parents have friends so that will be able to help. You can use that to your strategic advantage and pursue. Those pathways and also what you do. So those clubs and schemes events, you're out of school activities. So what, how you think, so your attitudes toward science, what you do and who you know. So I'll let I'll pass it over to Jen. Yeah. Jen, if you want to again, introduce yourself and then say any more about that, that you want to add. So yeah, I'm Jen DeWitt. I am a, I. Do research and evaluation in STEM engagement and participation, particularly with an equity lens. So I'm a recovering academic. I've worked on the Aspires project, which is partly what had given rise to the concept of science capital. And I was the researcher on the 1st, part of that project, and then continue to be involved with it for the following. Eight or so years, I think, and in terms of where the concept of science capital really arose and again, just to define the Aspires project was a sort of longitudinal cohort study following a particular group or cohort of individuals from the end. Or middle of year six up through their kind of early twenties. And looking at their aspirations related to science, but also is the project evolved their educational choices and the influences on those and the concept of science capital initially arose because of some patterns in the data that we couldn't really explain because they didn't quite follow along the lines that we necessarily thought in terms of who was. Maintain who was developing and maintaining science aspirations. And so in trying to figure out what else might be underpinning it. That was where this original concept or where the concept of science capital originally arose. And so it really is a construct or a way of bringing together all of the resources that. An individual has that kind of supports their engagement with science, or with stem more broadly, or if you wanted to go to other areas as well. Presumably there's well, there is would be capital in other areas. It's basically a resource. Or a set of resources that can support this engagement and identification with whatever it may be. In our case, we were looking at science. And as Julie said, one of the ways that you can break that down is into what, about science and how and your attitudes towards that, how relevant you think it is. The kinds of activities that you do related to science and particularly one area that's really key is who, related to science what in your kind of immediate or slightly extended circle, but who, personally. Yeah. And I guess thinking about like the way a lot of people would imagine how into science someone is, would largely have maybe originally hinged around just about what you know, like how good are you at science, how, what grades are you getting at school, and this kind of thing. And actually it feels like a lot of these other things are potentially things that are not even in your own control, right? The situation that you find yourself in, The family, the friends that you have, the resources that you have access to, especially as a child, it's not something you necessarily have that much influence over. So it's more of a situation that you find yourself in rather than you're not trying hard enough at school, yeah. It's about your circumstances. Very much. So I'd say, and I think, and that was part of the thing that really I think part of why the concept resonated with people, particularly in the science engagement, science communication world was it helped us move away. Some from this idea that, oh, if we just. give people enough knowledge, what we call the deficit model. What are they lacking? And we'll give it to them. If we just give them enough knowledge or just get them excited about science, then everything will be sorted. And it was a way of saying as academics do, it's not that simple. And but also I think one of the ways in which it's useful to think about is because It is outside of the individual's control, so it's not putting all the burden on them, but it also, hopefully anyway, inspires people working in science communication and education and so forth to think about what else they might be able to do to support this young person to relate to science, to make science more relatable for them, to almost develop a relationship. With it a bit more and to come come to feel like science is for them. What are the things they can do besides just it's exciting or giving them more knowledge and skills? I think also it's not an absolute thing - so that the value of the capital isn't absolute but it's dependent on What that young person is doing what field they say what field they're operating in and that some forms are more valuable than So I think Janet shifted that recognizing that What is a good science student in a classroom that kind of token behavior of being either the loudest or the quickest to put your hand up or recognizing that there's other forms of yeah, behaviors or things that we can recognize and bring out in the young people. So really valuing their experiences. Yeah, that, that sort of taps into what others can do that then helps young people, creates a space for young people where what they bring, the capital that they bring is valued and recognized and further supported. Yeah. And I guess, as you say, it's it's a much more complex thing than just this one dimension. Like it's almost like a multi dimensional version of understanding people's relationship with science. It also feels to me like it's going to be something that's really quite hard to measure in any kind of accurate way, because as I say, different things are worth different, they contribute in different ways to that experience. Yeah, I think it's something that we often, when this concept first came about, it was a very There was lots of drive to want to measure and assess and, oh, we can do an intervention and see if science capital's developed. And I know Jen and your consultancy work too, and that it is something that it's complex, it's nuanced, but also focusing on that part of the whole kind of picture of the intervention isn't necessarily what's always most appropriate. Yeah. And I would say we did, and have developed. Various measures where you can various kind of tools, where you can measure it. And, you'll get a number out and all that sort of thing. And it on the plus side, it recognizes that, in a very concrete way that there, it's been. It's about more than just knowledge. Or, positive attitude. So I think that is helpful. I think that the idea that you can quantitatively measure and increase. It's a, survey type tool and surveys are very blunt objects very blunt instruments. So it can be useful for getting a feel for how people might be relating to science, what their sort of place is with regard to that, but to then measure the impact of an intervention in that way it's very blunt. So it's, Kind of a pros and cons, and I always hesitate to use it and try to delve into more. What exactly do you think you might be supporting? What aspect of this are you interested in? And it was also developed in the context of an intervention in a school. So it relates to. What might, what resources might be valued or what resources might be useful in that sort of context. And yeah. Yeah. I feel like it's more useful- like less useful as a metric that you can say, "Oh, we have made this person's science capital go up by four or whatever". That you rather than that, it's more of like an approach to think about how you're designing activities and interventions or whatever it is you're doing. To be appreciative of the fact that not everyone is going to have the same level of science capital or that people with lower science capital maybe just won't even be there. So you need to find a way to reach the audiences that you're working with may have. Varying levels of this or the level that they have might depend massively on the context that you meet them. Yeah. Yeah. And the questions that you're asking and how you're looking at it. But yeah, I think if you just keep When we keep going back to the concept of the resources that they bring and because there will be something and what it is you're offering and trying to, support that kind of relationship and comfort level that they have with whatever it is that you're offering. I think that's on the right track. And there's the whole science capital teaching approach that's been extended into informal sectors, into to psycom, informal science and beyond really that. Builds on those ideas. And I think is we've been trying to encourage that to have more traction as a way of making science capital, a more useful, tool to think with and develop programs with and interact with. audiences or visitors or whoever, whomever it is you're interacting with. And so hopefully that will continue rather than getting into sort of the total nitty gritty as, as interesting as people like Julie and myself might find it of some of the measurement. It's interesting too, cause we talk about this deficit model, but I think with the, this whole kind of raising science capital among the young people, there's a danger that it gets to that level too, of what you were saying, Katie, that you have to. You want those scores higher, but actually moving more to putting attention and efforts on the kind of structures and systems and those kind of longer term interventions and figuring out what might be excluding the young people from entering and staying in STEM pathways is that's more the point. And it's often that any of these interventions that are focusing on changing the young people, even if it's that intervention focusing on developing super strong science capital, just wanting to. Just make sure that we're keeping in the back of our minds that it's a system, a kind of ecosystem that these young people are operating within. So short term, detached. From formal education, those types of programs just need to be mindful of. In our work on the Aspires Project, we started as a science focused. So we were looking at science aspirations, trajectories, and we always hoped and we were. it. Trying to extend that to the other STEM disciplines, but within our data collection, it was an ongoing challenge. So one thing we were particularly mindful in Aspires 2 and 3 was to add as much as we could in about maths, physics, engineering, technology. So to look at our findings and replicate those as much as we could within those disciplines. So something that we were really excited about in the second phase of the project was that we were able to look at our understanding of science capital and after using that as a lens to understand and explain the pattern nature of aspirations and educational goals. Participation for young people in science. We were able to explore whether this construct might actually be helpful applied to the other STEM disciplines. So in technology, engineering, and maths, and what our findings were able to show was that we can use science capital as a proxy for STEM capital. So specifically looking at the relationship between science capital and young people's trajectories or their kind of. Intentions to pursue maths, physics, engineering at degree level. So there were statistically significant correlations there. We were interested that engineering and physics had stronger relationships to science capital than say maths and technology, but there were still medium sized effect size that we were interested in exploring. And I think there's a really neat piece of and then we did some further research about looking into the different STEM disciplines and looking at within one data set, a kind of comparison. And that is something that it's tricky to do, but potentially exciting. And in Aspires 3, what we had some exciting data primary data, but also we did some secondary data analyses using HESA data and national statistics data. And Wasn't surprising and is published in other sources too, but this idea that the maths GCSE and A level uptake is high. So compared to other STEM disciplines and other kind of non STEM subjects. So for example, I think it was about 30 percent of the A level cohort in 2021 22 took maths A level. So that was the highest of all subjects. And within that, there's more men. However, the gender divide isn't as patterned as other subjects like the physical sciences, but there still is more men within that. And then also looking at the kind of uptake to undergraduates, which that doesn't transfer. So despite this high A level entry enrollment only I think about 1. 7 percent of all undergraduates were queer. pursuing maths degrees, and even within the STEM subjects, I think it was under 10%. So we spent a lot of time on Aspires 3 trying to figure out Professor Louise Archer devoted a huge amount of time figuring out the influencing factors on this divide between A level and trajectory. And that's again, why this where this maths capital, we were able to get a more more detailed picture of what that meant. She's termed it the kind of wrap around. So the wrap around of a mass related social, cultural and economic capital that over time is actually really important for young people to be able to develop a mass identity and follow that on with a maths trajectory, as something that's possible for them. I can imagine there's people listening who kind of work in maths promotion in various different ways, who've got this very strong sense of, that there must be something slightly different about the way this works for maths, because we potentially incorrectly have this perception that maths is this sort of unique thing that, people hate it, and people find it really difficult and stressful but at the same time it's incredibly useful and it's really important, and we get these high quality. A level numbers, but we also at the same time, the average person on the street that you talk to might be quite happy to say to you, Oh, maths is awful. I hate it. I strongly suspect that a lot of these things are true of science subjects as well, but we just don't get to experience it because, when we're asked what our job is, we always say mathematician and then we get the standard sort of response to that. But I think potentially science might have some of the same issues, but it does feel like a lot of this stuff is maybe more exaggerated for maths because it's got this particular Sort of stereotypical status. And that's actually something that came out of our analysis. So when we were able to compare the young people who were on maths degrees and we, when we looked at reasons for making that choice one of the top reasons was being good at the subject. And when we compared that to other STEM subjects. Subjects as well. That was still higher. And the more often choice for the other disciplines was having a really strong interest or a passion in it. Whereas for maths, it was being good. And then we also asked the young people who were not doing a maths degree, but actually had the prerequisite to be able to do a maths degree. And we asked them, why did you choose not to do maths? And the idea was disliked, not interested in it, hating the subject. So there was something around there that we've discussed in academic papers, this idea of intellectual superiority or this natural talent that you have to be able to be good at math, to be able to pursue a maths career, having a maths brain, or being a maths person. And those are really gendered and classed racialized notions that actually can restrict many young people from developing a sense that math's, can be something for them and that they can enjoy it and have a successful career in it. Yeah. So I guess the sort of science capital model or however we're applying it to maths capital, if we're calling it that I guess gives us a sense of where we need to be attacking this problem. We're not, it's not just a case of forcing more maths into these kids and getting them to be better at it. It's about thinking about the. The sort of systems and structures that make them feel like they're not a maths person, even if they're doing an A level in maths and getting a good grade. They somehow don't feel like that's a thing they can then carry on with. Like, how do we Attack those problems, that happened before that. Yeah, from my perspective, I would say it's that, and Julie, I don't know what, your thoughts are, but for me, that completely resonates. So this whole idea of, Absolutely. Oh, what we're going to do is just make everybody do maths to 18. In other words, pour in more knowledge. That'll sort everything out as opposed to thinking about what sorts of mass, courses or whatever are on offer. Thinking about what can be done to kind of, change entirely is important. very optimistic, but to shift the narrative a little bit around mats to something more that, and you've got a good starting point. Loads of people think it's useful. That's part of why so many people are doing, not same level, I'm sure that contributes to it to say is the game is the name of the game that we're trying to get even more people to do mass a level or more people to do it at university, or is it more that people will feel like, Oh, yeah, I can do the maths that I need to, I can understand the maths that I need to understand to be competent and to interact, to use it for the things that I need to use it for that. I want to use it for in my day to day life. And I think that underpins a lot of What we talk about with science capital as well, but and I think that's one of the ways in which science capital and mass capital are similar in that they can fulfill a kind of similar role. They're facing some similar issue, maths and science or individual science disciplines are facing. Certain challenges and some of the ways that we're encouraging people who work in these fields to think about it is or policymakers or whomever is, addressing those challenges in the wider field rather than pouring in more chemistry, physics, biology, maths, physics, and so on. Whatever it is. Absolutely. I think too, there's that whole, just looking at the A level uptake and the transfer to degrees stats, there might even be a kind of neat careers education piece about, we talk about maths as being really transferable and everybody takes it because it's a prerequisite for all of these different routes, but actually, what can we do with pure maths and what career opportunities can go beyond a degree in maths, I think is something that doesn't always come into the career education literature. And then within that too, looking at this idea of a self referral model. So if we have these young people having to opt in, how does that impact these patterns, these trends, and in terms of that kind of the inequalities associated with them. And that kind of would lead to mapping out provision. So getting some investment in looking at demographically, geographically, who is enrolling on these programs, what does it look like and how to support practitioners to support the young people and just getting a picture of what's happening in the first place. Yeah, I definitely agree with the notion of maths being transferable as someone who chose maths as a degree because I didn't want to have to decide what I wanted to do with my life yet. I'll just keep going with this and see where it takes me. But yeah. I think it's an interesting one because even I did chemistry and biology at university and maths was my absolute favorite subject. Calculus, I absolutely loved it. But there was, I remember no point of my pathway, even considering that a straight pure maths route would be for me and went to do chemistry and biology. So yeah, I miss it. Yeah. I feel like there is it's difficult sometimes for people who are trying to get people engaged in maths and the kind of outreach, public engagement stuff is about, how do we get people to want to be mathematicians? And the sort of idea of what's the kind of goal of this, what's the job at the end of that route? There's research mathematician, but it doesn't really feel like there's any other kind of end goal. And obviously research mathematician is going to be incredibly small number of people who get to go there. Yeah. What else can we do with. For example, a maths degree, if you do a maths undergrad degree, it turns out there are loads of things you can do with that. Loads of people who do that course, like people I remember I went to uni with, are doing an incredible range of jobs. But it's just a case of finding a way to showcase that and to make it clear that this isn't something that will just leave you locked in a room doing equations for the rest of your life. Absolutely. And I think it's really interesting because that applies to the other STEM disciplines as well. But there is something particularly within maths. within physics, within those kind of more research oriented disciplines that communicating it in a different way, it needs more, more thought. Absolutely. And I think also yeah, just not attributing it to those young people making that choice, but that if we're not opening these doors, realms of information that, how are they meant to decide? I was going to snarkily say, yeah, do maths and then you can go work in finance and make shed loads of money and possibly be evil, but I'm not sure we want to encourage that. Cool. So if people want to dig more into this, cause I realized there's a lot of research that's gone on behind all of this stuff and a lot of things people could read there is the paper from from 2020, I think that's called Science Capital or STEM Capital. Which is about this idea of taking the idea of science capital and applying it to other subjects, which you're both authors of we can definitely include a link to that in the show notes so people can find it. And I guess if there's any other things that you think people might be interested, we can also pop links to those in as well. The Aspires 3 final report would be maybe useful. There was a specific report for the maths findings as well. Yeah. Cool. We'll definitely include those. So thank you very much to both of you. And yeah, great work. Yeah. Thanks so much, Katie. Thank you very much for having us. --- That's all for this episode of the Talking Maths in Public podcast. Head to talkingmathsinpublic.uk/podcast for more episodes to suggest your ideas for future segments and to find out more about the TMiP network. See you then. The Talking Maths in Public podcast is presented and edited by Katie Steckles, and funded by the International Centre for the Mathematical Sciences. The music is For Her, by Lidérc on Pixabay.