Welcome to the Talking Maths in Public podcast, a community podcast for members of the Talking Maths in Public network, which is a UK organisation bringing together maths communicators of all kinds. My name's Katie Steckles, and I'm a maths communicator and member of the Talking Maths in Public team. In this podcast, we'll be hearing from various members of the community sharing their maths communication projects, recommending their favorite bits of maths comm, and discussing how we can communicate maths engagingly and effectively. In this episode, we'll be hearing from Frances Hunt, who's part of the team running Maths Week Wales. We'll also hear from mathematical knitters Madeleine Shepherd and Alison Kiddle about how maths and knitting are connected. To see links to things discussed in this episode and find more episodes, you can visit talkingmathsinpublic.uk/podcast. First up, I spoke to Frances Hunt about Maths Week Wales, which is taking place this year for the second time. --- So I'm talking to Francis Hunt who is part of the team that is running Maths Week Wales. So hello, Francis. Hello Katie. Thanks for having me. That's all right. Do you wanna tell us a bit about yourself and where this has come from? Yeah, okay. I work for the math support program in Wales, so we were the further math support program in Wales, like the one in England except much smaller. Like them we've changed our name because a busy teacher, if their school doesn't do further maths and you're trying to reach them, it's just gonna delete your email, so seems a good idea to me. Yeah I did maths so probably like many other people on this podcast. Ha- where did this come from? It happened when... I don't know how many people know Caroline Ainslie, who moved to Wales and wanted to get in contact. Alison Eves sent me a message and I invited her to our free teachers conference at the end of summer term. And she said, "What about a Maths Week Wales?" So I said, "Yeah, that's brilliant." Yeah - Caroline has been quite involved in Maths Week Ireland and a lot of the other kind of Maths Week projects, and Alison Eves is at the Royal Institution which I believe has some links with Maths Week England and, there, there's various different Maths Week projects, but I guess Wales is the one that didn't exist yet. Exactly and as I say I said yes, 'cause it clearly sounds like the thing we should be doing, but I didn't actually know what a Maths Week was unlike Caroline and Alison. But so I said by the way, what is a Maths Week?" And Caroline said, "Am I free this weekend?" And I said, "Yes." "Well come to Maths Week Ireland." So I fly across, met Eoin and Sheila, who are the... who started Maths Week Ireland. They're great people as well a lot of fun. Had a lot of fun other people, made enormous balloon pyramids in central Dublin with Tiago working the door to get people in past the fence. So that was an enormous amount of fun and then we did a tour down to Cork and I met Andrew Jeffery who does Maths Week Ireland, but obviously is a huge part of Maths Week England. In fact, I asked him, "Okay what are the things, if we do a Maths Week Wales, what are the things to be careful of?" And he made me laugh 'cause he said there's many organisations who think they should be doing the Maths Week, but they don't want to do the Maths Week. But above all, they don't want you to do the Maths Week." Yeah. Yeah, it, there's a, from what you're saying, there's a whole bunch of different people get involved in these kinds of things. So Tiago is a recreational mathematician in Portugal who's involved in a lot of the kind of Maths Jam gathering events and does mathematical magic and that sort of thing. And I think it really kind of speaks to the fact that this is... the nature of this event is basically just bring together as many people who want to do mathematical activities and things as possible for a week and just do that wherever they can. And yeah, as you say it varies depending on what kind of backing the organisation has. So I know Maths Week Ireland have a reasonably good kind of financial basis. They do really well at getting sponsorship for it without the sponsor requiring them to call it, the whatever maths week. It's quite a nice kind of arrangement that they have there. And I know Maths Week England is really grassroots. It's just Andrew pulling in people that he can find to, to do things, and it's grown from there, so is that, does that which approach are you gonna take, try and take for Maths Week Wales, yeah. Okay, no, that's a really good question. So yeah, Eoin, we're... The big advantage we have is that people know what a maths week is apart from me. Yeah. There, there's a clue in the name, right? It's a week when you do maths, and- Yeah ... I feel like a lot of these things, it's just more of an excuse to do something. Like a lot of school teachers would love to do more kind of outreach, enrichment type things with the kids, but they just don't have the momentum to do that. And if it's like, "Oh it's part of this bigger thing though, so we have to do something 'cause it's Maths Week." The fact that there is one that is for the country that you're in, is a useful hook to hang things on. You are so right. One of the big things we hope is it's just a space which en- enables teachers, gives... they can say to senior management, "It's Maths Week Wales. We need to do this. We're... i'm afraid I'm gonna need to take the children out, and we're gonna do something exciting." So yeah. It's - like you say, different weeks have different ways of doing it. It's very much Eoin and Sheila have fantastically raised the profile in Ireland. Scotland's government-led from a report they produced. England, it's, yeah, I certainly have Andrew, and I know Rob Eastaway and Ems Lord are big in it, but there's loads of people. And like you say, that is the thing. It comes from the enthusiasm and people willing to share their enthusiasm which really powers it and enables it. So the model we had- and have. We just got loads of people in a virtual room together and said, "Eh, what are you gonna do?" A- and a number of organisations automatically do some sort of outreach, and so it's just by doing it in the same week, it cuts through a bit more, is the hope. And also you... If those organisations do something which makes sense to them, we thought much better if everyone does their own thing which is sensible to them. As long as it's building up an inclusive mathwyl then we can publicize it centrally, and it gives a lot more... It's a lot more scalable. And it's also a lot easier for me. If I was a really organised person, maybe the centralised approach might have more mileage, but me, I, yeah. Yeah. I get the impression that so- organisations that have centralised funding to do things will do a lot of the organising themselves. They'll bring in speakers, or they'll bring in people to run things, and put on events and that kind of thing. And obviously, that's wonderful. But it is impressive just how much can be done with the power of kind of a centralised, almost like program of events, that if people are looking for something, if everyone puts stuff into that, then you can look at that and go, "Oh, there's a thing near me," or, "There's a thing I can join." And that is... it has the same kind of effect, even if none of it's actually coming from a central sort of organised hub. And the other possibility which worked very well, the Royal Institution were keen to do something, didn't have a venue. There was a museum which had a venue, wasn't sure what to do. And that worked brilliantly. That was Techniquest. Similarly we did something at the waterfront, which was a huge amount of fun. It was their Christmas fair. We just said, "Oh, we could do something." 'Cause, decorating pine cones is part of it, and Fibonacci spirals - you can see them in pine cones. Wonderful, yeah. So it, it's all... Yeah, it's all good. And the teachers we spoke to, they, they wanted, yeah, just something to bring maths alive. So it's a great space, great opportunity. Yeah, and I guess the kind of thing you can do with reasonably small amounts of funding is produce resources. If you've got volunteers that are keen and interested, you can produce instructions for activities and things that you can then circulate. And even if a teacher is absolutely stressed to the limit and doesn't have time to prepare anything, they can at least pick something up and just go, "This is what we're doing for Maths Week," kind of thing. Absolutely. And many organisations already have... So NRICH were incredibly helpful. Loads of... The problem of naming people is it's gonna be the... I'm bound to forget people, so I apologise for that. UKMT, they did a Problem of the Week in Welsh. Oh, wonderful. Yeah. Flip side. Okay, what's the downside of this model? It is the... Funding does unlock things. And particularly, maths communicators do need to eat. Yeah. And although they're, they've, they're, they are very willing, people are willing to do an awful lot, I don't think it's fair. And so I think that's the... We'd like to jo- now we've got something on the ground, something's happened we can try to get some more funding. 'Cause it's very good to see what they do in Ireland with their... Bring their people together and get their funding. We did actually have a funder who was very I was very impressed by. They, they didn't wanna- publicise their name, but they gave us £5,000. We thought, "What's the best thing we could do with that?" What we actually went with was copying Maths Week Scotland's idea for small grants to schools ... basically just to say, "Okay, what would you do?" 'Cause sometimes you think a teacher might have a great idea, but if just a bit of money would help that. And yeah, that was something I was very pleased we managed to get working. Yeah. And they can... There is a scope there for them to say, "Actually, what we'd like to do is get a maths communicator in and do something." Yeah. I think this is the thing that the big secret of the whole of the kind of informal learning community is that so much of it is run on the backs of volunteers, right? And that there's all of these events happening, and obviously sometimes there's funding for things and it's fantastic and people can get paid for their time. But so much- ... of it is "Oh we haven't really got a budget, so we just need to get some volunteers to do a thing." And obviously that's a great way for people to learn and to get into the industry and to sort of- ... see how things work and build experience. And obviously people who are retired or otherwise supported can absolutely give up their time to do that. But I think- ... yeah it can be almost like an accessibility thing, that if you're a person who's not from a situation where you have the capacity to work for free it excludes- people from the the community in some way. Yeah it's fantastic to also have those kind of opportunities coming through. And as you say, once you've got this program there and this reputation that you're building up there may be more sources of funding that come in from that. Yeah. Yeah. We also did get £500 from Admiral, and we've designed a poster on that. So yeah, it's a... There, there is... I think, one of the challenges these days is there's so many, so much information, so any... I'm sure anyone with funding gets loads of people contacting them and trying to work out if it's a sensible thing. So hopefully track record helps with that. They say, "Oh yeah, actually there was a lot of children involved in that, and that looks to be going the way." Downside, when I, when we were originally discussing this with my boss the late, great Sofya Lyakhova she said one of the, disadvantages of getting someone to fund you is you then have to do what they say." Yeah. It depends on the funders. But your point about enabling some of the best people to get, or some very good maths communicators to get involved- Although they would do it free, I don't think it's fair, and that's ... So that, that's one thing I would like to try to improve if we can do something. One of the challenges last year, there were just so many possibilities and opportunities. Some of them we didn't manage to pick up on. Y- there was U3A, someone gave me some leads there. There was an offer from Bath that they had some talks, but we hadn't got a venue sorted for that, and yeah. But that said we'll try to see where we can go a bit more on that. But, and again, the Joint Maths Association, when I announced it, loads of people enthusiastic said, "Oh, look," they'd be really happy to get involved. And yeah. So if I guess I do this as an apology. If we didn't get you involved, it, it wasn't 'cause it was a bad offer. It's just that we, through organisational funding and everything, Yeah, there, there's a lot of work in pulling everything together as well. It's... and you know ... people offer things, but then it takes a bit more work to then turn that into something that's actually happening. I'm sure that as a team you're doing what you can and obviously you need to make sure that the things you are doing are going and they're being well-received, and that, you can't just put absolutely everything out there without having an eye on it sort of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's the sort of it, yeah, swings and sort of roundabouts and balance, and I'm very much the like to empower people to do how they see it, 'cause it's enriching rather than having your own sort of vision. And things which work will work, and we say, "Oh, brilliant." Yeah. "Let's do that next time." And again, you get that kind of big mix of lots of different approaches and different people getting involved and that, that's part of what this is about, is to show the breadth of what maths is and what you can do with it. Oh, definitely. Hugely one of the things we're... we did have a huge laugh when we were... last week, 'cause one of the things I didn't manage to pick up on was getting prisons involved, 'cause I, I had... did have a, an exchange, but it, we didn't actually manage to get somewhere. So we were having a good hoot last week about whether we could do an escape room in a prison! 'cause that would be... some ways, yeah. It was very funny to us at the time. But if your house has just been burgled, it would be less funny, I imagine so. So it amused us as an idea, but, Yeah, but I mean- ... I think we'll have to go carefully on that ... I've heard some great examples of outreach in prisons, 'cause obviously it's a sector- that doesn't necessarily get the same kind of attention as other places, and it's a, you know- ... it's really nice to be able to reach out to the whole community, everyone, not just kids in schools. 'Cause a lot of stuff is focused on kids- ... in schools. But having a sense- ... of who else is out there and who else do we wanna be targeting? Yeah. Yeah. I think Maths For All does mean "for all", and some are harder to reach than others. And things I've done is often - actually, parents when they come round, if you're doing something they say, "Yeah, I used to like this at school." And they'll do some puzzles and they wanna beat their children at whatever game we've got there. Yeah. Fantastic. So for Math Week Wales, I guess what plans do we have for the future? What's the next step with that? Okay. Things I'm aware that we haven't done is reach into North Wales. All our physical events last year were South Wales based partly because that's where most population is, and I guess people who did things were there. And I'm based in the south. So we're trying to do something up north also with the Welsh language. So Welsh language is very important in Wales, rightly so, Mathwyl means maths in Welsh and English. So we have got links there, but see what we could do with that. And also, I had a conversation with someone at Liverpool t- talking about outreach across the top of North Wales 'cause they have done things there before and we were looking into whether we could f- like with Techniquest and the Ri, whether there was scope for someone providing a venue and doing that. So didn't quite a- align this time round, but or first time round, but we'll see where we can go with that. Perhaps more involvement of primaries, 'cause like you say, the natural catchment is secondaries and it reflects who we've got involved. So that'll be about getting perhaps more finance. It's slightly organic. We because as I say, people are doing their thing, these are sort of things that directions I would quite like if we could... if the funder's happy again to do the program for schools, I'd like to do that again. But also this thing of get- getting some funding for enrichment specialists- who are not part of organisations who can naturally stretch to it. I guess those are the things that have, as I've said, maybe investigate prisons, pick up leads that we didn't pick up last time with people. So it's there's no one, this is the key initiative. It's these are some sort of directions we'd like to push towards- Yeah ... to expand towards. Again good friends at Aberystwyth, they were thinking of doing something. We'll have a conversation with them, see if they're still up for it. Yeah. So just gradually growing and evolving into a bigger thing with more stuff going on. I guess that's a, it's a good direction. Yeah. I guess- Yeah ... the question then is one for the audience. What are you, what would you like to do for Maths Week Wales? And go for it. So it, it's great. Something... Okay, one minor change we've done this week, 'cause speaking to teachers, whether we pulled it back one week, one week earlier away from Christmas, 'cause particularly with primaries if they're rehearsing their Christmas play come December. It's hard to find space for anything else. We now overlap a weekend with England. We're not sure whether that's good or whether that's a clash, but there, there's a sort of notion of part handing over the torch to our cousins over the water. Yeah. So maybe there's scope for doing something. So, all ideas are good. We're at that stage, and then if we can shape them a- and make them work, but very much if you've got a good idea and you've ... in particular, you work for an organisation or you've got some way of getting funded, more power to your elbow. Excellent. So just to confirm the dates for the Maths Week now, having moved it back a week? It will be the 21st of November to the 29th of November. So 21st to the 29th. So- Okay ... moved one week ago. So as you say, Maths Week England is the week before that running into that weekend, and then you've got a bit of overlap and ... that, that is nice. Yeah. It's a nice it's just maths, maths fortnight generally. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Maths goes on and on. There, there's no ... even on the first week, I had this idea that people did say, "I can't quite fit in the week," and say that's the great skill of maths." You say, no, Maths Week, also it, something happening in February is part of Maths Week- Yeah as well. Just happen we, convenient labelling. Maths is all about labelling things well. Every week is Maths Week. Yeah. Fantastic. Exactly. This is either a a pre-taste or a building on it. So yeah. I guess one thing I would like to add is just to say big thank you to everyone who was involved in this Maths Week, whether in planning or giving things. So thank you very much, and here's to the next year. So we- we'll share some links in the notes under the podcast to the Maths Week Wales website and anything else you want us to send on to people. But thank you so much for chatting to us, Francis. It's great to hear it, and hopefully you'll get some contact from people who wanna add to the Maths Week Wales Collection of things. Yeah. Fantastic. Thank you very much, Katie, for having the ... Yeah a very enjoyable chat and having the opportunity. --- Up next on the Talking Maths in Public podcast, maths is a broad-reaching subject with many crossovers, and one which Madeleine Shepherd has spent many years exploring is how maths and knitting are stitched together. We asked Alison Kiddle, who's also a mathematical knitter, to chat to Madeleine about her work and how knitting can be very mathematical. --- Hello, I'm Alison Kiddle. I'm a maths communicator and member of the Talking Maths in Public committee. And I'm here today with Madeleine Shepherd to talk a little bit about the maths of knitting. So my maths background is that I did a maths degree, I then went into maths teaching, and then ultimately ended up as a maths communicator. My knitting background, arguably I started knitting a little bit earlier than maths maybe. I can't remember a time when I couldn't knit. I learnt when I was five or six, started to learn, became competent by the time I was a teenager. Then went away and dabbled in crochet for a while, discovered machine knitting about three or four years ago, and that's me as a mathematician and a knitter. So Madeleine, what about you? I have a similar background, although it's considerably older. I started, I was really interested in maths and science growing up. My dad was a scientist, and that kindled that. And I left school to do a degree in astrophysics dropped out of it and became a textile designer and kind of punk clothing person. Tried to make a business out of that, and part of the center of that was knitting. But it was quite extreme hand knitting for textures and so on. But all the way through it I could tell there was maths and science in what I was doing. And then I ended up having to get a proper job, which was with the Open University, and then I just went back and did a degree in maths and life sciences while I was there. Their s- modular structure makes that really good easy to do. And then I got into science communication as well, and did a master's with them. And but I've never quite made either of those things be my living, so it's been university admin. But now that I have taken early retirement, I'm focusing on the maths in my knitting and trying to make something of that. Yes I've recently started to look at how my maths and knitting go together, so I'm a lot earlier on the linking maths with knitting- ... journey than you are. But I was invited to do a talk, and pitched the hidden maths of knitting to a science festival- ... last year. And I've now done that a couple of times. I did a very similar talk at MathsWorld in London for one of their- ... LATES events. And so that talk was really all about the bits of maths that I had noticed whilst learning about knitting machines. I've done a little bit of stuff for schools as well about how to knit a circle, which is really a way of getting them to think about the geometry of circles. And I show them how on a punch card knitting machine, if you were to make a circular design, it actually comes out as an ellipse because knitting stitches aren't square. So it's really a way of getting them to think about transformations and graphs. But using examples from knitting to illustrate the ideas and as well as the being able to talk a little bit about the computer science because of things like electronic knitting machines, punch card knitting machines, that's all tied into some of the stories of computer science and programming. And also, I think, just the idea of a knitting pattern being a kind of- Algorithm, a kind of program is something- Yeah ... that crops up in what I do. But I think you're more about the knitting of maths than the maths of knitting. So- Yes ... what is it that you're doing in your work? When I started out doing this, I was purely a hand knitter. I hadn't got back into machine knitting again since my early business. And I was doing it for maths communication purposes. But the idea I'd come up with was to use craft skills to get people into doing something and then tell them there was maths in it, but they were making mathematical objects. So first things I was doing were knitting Möbius strips. Now this is an example. It's knitted from the center out. Can I just describe this to anybody listening? Hopefully we'll be able to get a picture online as well for y- you to look at. So this is beautifully colored in some oranges and purples, and it's a Möbius band, so I can see the twist in it. But the knitting is gonna give me a different way to think about the maths of it because of the way it's constructed. So how on earth is that knitted? How do you do that? That is the cast-on row right in the middle of the piece, and it's done on a circular needle using a provisional cast on. And then you can actually knit both sides of your cast-on row as you go, and it spreads out this way across the... So it- So you- So basically you make a tiny narrow Möbius strip with your cast on, and you twist your circular knitting needles around so that they form the edges of the Möbius strip, and then you just build on that edge- S- until you get, get it as wide as you want. And I've just chosen particular stitch pattern so that it's stretchy and it's... the colors are built into the yarn. It's one of those fancy yarns- Ah ... that have all the colors in it already, so you're not changing and l- creating lots of loose ends to tie in at the end. So the only seam in it is right on the edge there where that purple meets the paler purple. I would use these as kind of demonstration pieces and give people much simpler things to do. There's a much simpler way of crocheting the same structure. So I was just about to say- Yeah. ... I once made a Möbius shawl out of crochet. And the instruction was to start with a really long chain and join it. But, put a twist in the chain, which of course is the opposite of what you're usually trying to do. You're usually trying to avoid putting a twist in Yeah. Yeah ... but once you put the twist in to start with, then it just- grows outwards from there. And I think it gives you a different appreciation- ... of the structure of the Möbius strip- Yeah ... to make one like that rather than the classic way of just making a twist- ... in a piece of paper and sticking it. And then from that I moved on to doing other crochet forms. I discovered the work of Daina Taimina and hyperbolic crochet. And it's so easy to do. It's actually easier than doing flat circles properly to do these, Things like this. This is a small one that's a brooch, and again, it's done in multicolored yarns. But it starts from a very small amount of stitches in the round going outwards, increasing at the same rate all the time. And eventually you get so much material that it curls back on itself and shows off its negative curvature in a very beautiful way. This sort of work was picked up by people in California who... called the Institute for Figuring, who created the Hyperbo- international hyperbolic crochet coral reef project. And there were various satellite versions of it all around the world, including one in London, and that's where I got into that sort of thing. And I wanted to do one for Edinburgh, but there were various conditions attached, like how do you store it after you've made it and, because these things are huge. They fill up art galleries and so on. And I realized we... there wasn't the practical resources to do that in Edinburgh. So I was working at the time with a mathematician called Julia Collins on other textile projects, and between us we came up with something called Botanica Mathematica, and we made our own little miniature bonsai forest of binary trees, all knitted and crocheted by volunteers from around Europe and America. And that was an interesting way of using knitting and crochet to explore mathematical ideas. And building on that sort of stuff, I was actually getting back in more interested in the technical side of actually producing the knitting and wanting to make bigger pieces. And also when I'd done my maths degree, I encountered a thing, it was called cellular automata, which probably pop up more for computer scientists, but they were an interesting bridge between some of the life sciences and the maths I was studying then as kind of growth processes and ways of simulating biological growth, and that really I'd always wanted to do that. But the hand knitting of big enough pieces to show what's going on was really quite intimidating. Although it can be done, and I can point you at a website pattern from our Botanica Mathematica project that, that will let you do it. That's when I started getting interested in knitting machines again, and also I discovered that people had been adapting knitting machines to allow you to get away from the built-in symmetries that you're forced to use. Particularly with punch cards, you have a punch card that allows you to select Different needles to do different things. Mostly it's color work, so it goes, one color goes into the selected needle and the other color goes into the non-selected needle, and you get a nice Fair Isle style pattern. But these cards are 24 stitches across, and they are... So they have lots of factors. You can do lots of different se- repeat patterns, but say you wanted to do a pattern of 17 stitches and repeat it without any other patterns in between. You couldn't do that. And if you wanted to do something that was bigger than 24 stitches, it was difficult. But in the 198- late 1980s, electronic machines started coming on the market, and they had more flexibility. You could actually program in patterns of up to 60 stitches without a repeat. And then some of the more sophisticated ones, you were able to stitch together different... when I say stitch together, you could program it so that you could set it up with two or three different patterns, and the machine would store them all in its memory and put them together for you across the widths of your knitting. But it was incredibly fiddly to do, 'cause you had to color in tiny little rectangles on a piece of plastic that it would then read optically. And so in the early 2000s, people started adapting these old machines so you could just plug a computer straight into them. And at that point, you could control all the st- needles across the bed of the knitting machine or all the stitches across the widths of your knitting to create any kind of pattern you liked. So that's when I started doing the cellular automata properly. It's, Do I have a- another piece to hold up to the camera that the listeners cannot see? What I'm seeing here is black and white knitting in what looks like a very chaotic pattern with little bits of structure in. I can't remember which of the cellular automata patterns are which, so I'll let you tell me which one it is. This is an elementary one-dimensional cellular automaton. So the pattern is created by building up the generations of a one row of pixels with a rule to tell you what's in the next row, and that particular rule is called rule 30, and the rules are classified by Stephen Wolfram who really did this huge, deep dive into the subject many years ago. And so these patterns A lot of them, the rule that you would, you could develop by looking at, Your random row of input or your specific row of input is the first row of your pattern, and it's on a square grid. So the next row, all the cells are lined up exactly below the ones you're working with. So you look at the cells above the one you're wa- wanting to color in, whether it be black or white, and you look directly above and to the right and left of that, and what colors are in those determine what colors are in the one you want to fill. And there are many ways of doing that, so all of those ways were classified. And the ones, most of them degenerate into blank black or blank white all the way through. Some of them go to stripes, some of them go to very regular patterns. There's one that ends up looking very... a couple that end up looking very much Sierpinski's triangle- Yeah ... aren't there? Because I've- So when we get to the fractal phase, yeah. Because I've done this as a workshop- Yeah ... doing the coloring in bit of it as a mathematical mindfulness activity- Yeah ... to get people sitting and coloring on a grid following a rule and looking at the patterns- ... that emerge. Yeah. And so there's... I know there's a page on Wikipedia that's got little thumbnails showing all of the different rules- that you can get- Yeah ... and what patterns they, they get. We m- we might stick a link in somewhere for that- Yeah ... so that people can go and see if they haven't. Yeah. Wolfram was actually at a conference I was at. It was a mathematical biology conference up in Dundee celebrating the 100th anniversary of a book by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson called On Growth and Form, and he was giving the keynote speech, and I gave a five-minute talk about Botanica Mathematica and the same thing. And anyway, I was wandering around the social spaces wearing this, and he came up to me, and he was... I had it on 'round my neck, so one end was like that. And he said, "Oh, you've got it on upside down." And I went, "Oh, no, I haven't. It starts down here, and it goes all the way up and 'round the other side." "Oh, of course. Oh, let me try it on." So this piece has actually been 'round Stephen Wolfram's neck. That's- And I was being such a goofy fan girl I forgot to take a photo of him. But anyway, he somehow remembered that, and when the... his major book at its 25th anniversary, and it is a book that covers all of this cellular automata work and its implications, and it's called A New Kind of Science. They put together a gallery of works- That used these ideas, and he's got two photographs of my work in that gallery. So this is a very rich field, pattern generation and information processing. And in fact, I think you were talking about Sierpinski triangles coming out of it. You then get these ones that are completely non-repeating. Rule 30 is one of them, and there's another one, I think it's rule 110, and it's it's also been shown to be Turing complete, so it has extra properties. It means that you can actually build a universal computing machine out of that rule, which is mind-blowing to me. The next kind of cellular automata I came across was John Conway's Game of Life. So Rule 30 and its friends are one-dimensional, and so they work on a line of cells, a line of pixels at a time, and you can accumulate the lines underneath each other, and that's where the patterns come from. With Conway's Game of Life, it's two-dimensional, so you have a grid, which has the pattern, and you have the rule of the Game of Life, which, in which the building cells will either die of loneliness or die of overcrowding or spontaneously generate if they've got just the right balance. And then you have a new grid filled in. So you can either have it on multiple sheets of squared paper, or you can have it animated in that you see each of these screens on the computer one after the other. And when you see how those screens develop from one to another, it really does look like little microscopic organisms wriggling about. But within that system, there are also quite regular patterns that pop out. And way back in the '90s, I went, "That looks just like a motif from Fair Isle or Shetland's traditional knitting." But I went through all my books on Shetland knitting, and I couldn't find the same motifs, so I realized they weren't quite the same. And that's when I started thinking about knitting Conway's Game of Life. But you don't get the the movement that most people associate with playing with the Game of Life so I had to find a whole other way of developing it into my knitting, and that's where I came up with just taking repeat not repeating patterns, but cyclical patterns like these. Under the rules of the Game of Life, this Blue and yellow pattern we've just changed into that one, which we've changed into that one, which we've just changed into that one again. It's subtly different, but I'm just pulling them out and arranging them to look like traditional Fair Isle knitting. So you're using the rows of the what looks like traditional Fair Isle knitting to show different stages of the evolution of the things in the Game of Life. Yeah. Yeah. And the narrow red rows, which would be called peerie patterns in Shetland, are made up of a particular motif called the glider, and there's four stages of it, and then it goes back to the same shape. But with the glider, I've not really got the sense of what it does because I'm forced into using straight rows with the Shetland styling. But that moves across the screen as it regenerates each time. So it's, it actually moves around, and that's the sort of thing that most people like about the Game of Life when they're playing with it. And on the computer screen. So I started looking through the Game of Life for pa- lots of patterns that either do this. One of the most famous ones is called the pulsar, and this is just an offcut, but you can see that's one stage of it. And that transforms into this, which transforms into that, and then it goes back again. So again, I've used stages as motifs, but they're arranged in a traditional fashion that Shetland knitting would've used. And there's more and more of these patterns. But there are also static patterns in the Game of Life called agars, and they just, they either sit still or they repeat through. There's, and some of them look just like classic knitting patterns anyway. So if you program these into, these patterns into the Game of Life as your starting grid, they just sit there as long as it thinks it's infinite. But if you put a boundary on it, it decays from the edges. So it's another kind of interesting way to go. And this one is an agar that changes. It, it- It has to be infinite unbounded piece of one pattern, but it will ge- it goes through a cycle of generations of that one. So it's only three, sorry. It's... And they again look very nice. So I could sell these as knitting patterns without telling anybody anything about the maths, but I couldn't do that. It's not in me to not tell people about the maths as well. But it's- So- ... a way of getting their interest and then exposing them to the maths. So this is something that I wanted to ask because I've done my hidden maths of knitting talk a couple of times now- and I'm hoping to do it again. I'm doing it at a festival this summer, and then I'm hoping to hone it and get it out to some more science festivals. And from the times I've done it so far, the audience has been a mixture of mathematicians who know very little about knitting, knitters who maybe don't know so much about maths, and then people who are already in the sort of centre of the Venn diagram where we're sitting. Yeah. And I found it really interesting that by trying to talk to both people who are there for the knitting and people who are there for the maths, you can get really interesting conversations emerging where mathematicians look at things in a different way because they've not thought about it through the lens of knitting. And then knitters are thinking about their craft differently because they've never looked at it through the lens of maths. How do you find that comes out in your conversations with people about your work? Sometimes I just don't have the conversation. I j- well, or it depends on the context that they discover my work. If I had, say a market stall or a o- an open day at one of our that we have at the studios and they were coming along looking at the work, I would listen to what they were saying to each other if they... Or sometimes people will pick it up, but the first thing they do is they feel it and they think, "Oh, that's nice lambswool," or whatever, and they don't really think about the pattern. They just look at the colors and whether it suits them and. And I had somebody last Christmas. She marched straight into the studio and said, "I want that." And it was bright pink and pale gray, and it had huge orange pompoms on the ends. It was a really big chunky scarf, and it was all based on one of the Game of Life agars. And she just threw it round her shoulders, and it looked terrific, and I didn't mention it at all. But it had a swing ticket on that tells you where the pattern came from and a link to finding out more if you want to. So the conversation's always there, even if people don't pick up on it straight away. But I find that if there, if it's two or three people and one of them is science-y, let's say they'll go, "Oh, look at this. Oh, yes." And my work doesn't just include this. It includes using sections of images from NASA photographs of planets and portraits of s- historical scientists and things like that. So they always start off asking me, "How do you convert a photograph into a portrait?" So you get into the technical side of it there, and then you say, "And of course it's really useful for doing mathematical things too." And so you can bring it in that way as well. But the, you have to have the eye-catching statement pieces, draw them in. I guess it's this principle within maths communication and wider science communication of doing something that's meeting people where they're at- Yeah ... and making things available to them so that should they wish to look in more detail- Yeah ... they know where to go. Okay. Give you a sneak peek of something else I'm working on. So basically what I'm doing is knitting the shirt tile from discoveries a few years ago. So it is actually a wearable shirt. So it the tile itself breaks down into right-angle triangles. So that's, so each side of the garment will be one copy of the tile. But in order to give it some interest, I've colored the triangles. So the triangular stuff is two-colorable as well, so there's always lots of maths going on there in different ways. But some people just go, "Oh, that's cool. I'll just... Yeah, I want one." But that's- And I, yeah. I guess that's what we want. We want people to be able to engage with the maths at whatever level they're at. Yeah. And if it makes them... I- if they know that they've spoken to a mathematician or someone who's using maths to inspire their work, it's going to give them- ... a slightly different perspective on who we are and what it is we do. Now, I know you've got- Yeah ... an exhibition coming up, haven't you? Ooh. Yes, that's right. And the shirt tile will be one of the, focuses of that, I've got three projects on the go that I want to showcase in the exhibition. So there's the shirt tile shirt. There's a computational kimono, which is basically using the cellular automata to create the fabrics for making Japanese style jackets and so on. And then the other thing is geological, 'cause it's the 300th anniversary this year of the birth of James Hutton, who was one of the founders of modern geological thinking, and he happened to be born in Edinburgh. So I'm doing stuff that's a portrait and some geological map kind of things. But he also had this key phrase "No vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end," to describe the geological processes. And I thought, wouldn't it be great to get that on a Möbius strip? So I'm working on that. So there will be some maths in the geology bit too. Yeah. And that will be the beginning of October in Coburg House Arts Studios gallery down in Leith, in Edinburgh, where I have my studio. I'm really hoping that I'm gonna be able to make it up to Scotland to see that. And I'm sure lots of the people listening to this will as well. Thank you very much for taking the time to talk with me today, Madeleine. And yeah, happy knitting. Thank you. Ha- thank you for having me. And yes, happy knitting. Get out there and knit stuff. -- 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 podcast segments, and to find more about the TMIP network. Tune into the next episode for more mathematical communication chat Alex Bellos: The Talking Maths in Public podcast is presented and edited by Katie Steckles and funded by the International Center for the Mathematical Sciences. The music is For Her by Lidérc on Pixabay.