Talking Maths in Public Podcast

Series 2, Episode 3 - Transcript

Katie Steckles: Welcome to the Talking Maths in Public Podcast, a community podcast for members of the Talking Maths in Public Network, which is a UK organization bringing together maths communicators of all kinds. My name's Katie Steckles, and I'm a maths communicator and a member of the Talking Maths in Public team.

In this podcast, we'll be hearing from the TMIP 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 Tom Briggs about his work bringing maths into museums through consultancy and support.

We'll also chat to Nada, who's a PhD student at King's College London who teaches on their King's Factor outreach project. And finally, we'll talk to Emma Coutts, who runs a maths support center at Heriot-Watt University called the Campbell Maths Gym. To see links to the things discussed in this episode and find more episodes of the podcast, you can visit talkingmathsinpublic.uk/podcast.

First up, I spoke to Tom Briggs about how he helps museums bring out their mathematical flavour. I'm talking to Tom Briggs, who is... i'll let Tom introduce himself and tell you a bit more about who he is and what he does. Tom, hello. 

Tom Briggs: Hi, Katie. Yes, I am Tom Briggs. I am a maths communicator and museum learning consultant. That's what I tend to call myself. I've carved out a niche for myself, and then I'm trying to convince people that they want me to fill it. 

Katie Steckles: Yeah, I think that's the way with a lot of jobs in maths communication, is that if someone says, "What do you do?" It's like, well- ... how long have you got with me? Would you like the 30-second version or the five-minute version?" But yeah, so you've done a whole bunch of different things, to get to where you are. 

Tom Briggs: Yeah I am... If we go back to the beginning, I am a trained maths teacher with a fair bit of experience behind me now and there was a point in 2013 where I jumped tracks into museum education.

I worked at Bletchley Park for seven and a half years, and that, that came to an end in October 2020 for the COVID pandemic. A lot of sites ended up going through restructures and redundancy, and I was one of the people that ended up being made redundant. And I had to find something else to do. I wasn't as worried as a lot of people were at the time because I was a trained teacher, so I thought, I could get a job as a maths teacher quite easily. I could go back into that, but I don't- thought I didn't want to. I don't want to do that. I don't want to go into leadership or something like that.

I quite like the heritage side of things. But finding another role that had that overt maths link would have been really difficult because it's not happening a lot in the heritage sector. So I thought maybe I could try and solve that problem doing a bit of freelance work. I can try and convince museums that actually they do want to do a little bit more maths, and they want to explore their own mathematical stories.

So I went part-time maths teaching just to keep the wolf from the door, and part-time freelancing. And it's been just over a year now since I left my part-time teaching role and became a full-time freelancer, and it's been a weird, it's been a weird year. It's worked better than I expected it to.

I've also had a book published in that time and been invited on the TMIP podcast, which is, like, a professional highlight. 

Katie Steckles: Yeah that, that's peak, yeah. 

Tom Briggs: I'm not sure where to go after this. 

Katie Steckles: Yeah, that's the peak of a career. Yeah. I think that's part of the beauty of... freelancing is terrible and wonderful at the same time.

It's the kind of thing where you can almost say "This is the thing I want to be doing," and almost create a job doing the thing that you want to be doing. If handled carefully, and with a, obviously a sensible choice of job something that could feasibly exist. There are many jobs I could make up that I would love to be doing but I don't think they really would happen.

But yeah, this idea of kind of something that, that crosses over between this kind of heritage sort of history culture, all of that kind of stuff, but then also bringing maths into that as well. 

Tom Briggs: Yeah. I think it's really nice. It's something that I've come at more recently than a lot of people I talk to realize.

I did, as part of my degree, I did maths with astronomy graduated in 2004. And as part of that degree, I did a module in history of mathematics, and I got my highest grade in that module out of all the modules I did across the whole degree. But I came away from it with the idea that module wasn't necessarily a serious maths module.

It was... t almost felt a bit like light relief. It was like, here's a novelty module for you to have a go at and then we get back to the proper maths. It never crossed my mind that there were people who actually study history of maths until probably around five or six years ago, when I realized the British Society for the History of Mathematics existed, and I joined that and went along to the Research in Progress meeting, which is an annual thing where maths historians get together and present the research they're doing, the research that is in progress, and there's loads of them, and it's just, it blew my mind.

This is actually a thing that people study, and it's really interesting. And sort of things just snowballed from there, I think. I work on the basis, as in my freelance work, I work on the basis that every single museum, gallery, castle, heritage site, whatever, has a mathematical link in it somewhere.

It has a mathematical story, and also that it doesn't have to be a contrived mathematical link. ... And so far I haven't had to pack up and stop doing what I'm doing. Yeah, I feel like if I came across a site where I had a chat with them and looked through their stories and histories and couldn't find a mathematical link, I feel like I would have to go, "Okay the game's up. I need to go back and get a proper job now." And so far everything I've done has reinforced my conviction that there is a mathematical story behind everything, running, just bubbling under the surface for a lot of places. 

Katie Steckles: Yeah. So I guess there's sort of two aspects to this, 'cause the history of maths is the things that mathematicians did in the past, right? And the way that we discovered the maths that we have and the way that that's developed over time. But then, yeah, there's this other angle to it that there is maths in everything, so to, to whatever extent that's true. It's a thing that people often say, and I think it's sometimes very slightly unhelpful.

"Oh, everything is maths." It's like, if you're not a fan of maths, that's a terrifying thing to hear. There are often mathematical stories behind things, and I guess drawing that out, even if it's something you wouldn't expect to have maths in there, there will be some aspect of it that involves some logic or problem-solving or numbers or calculations or modelling or something, 

Tom Briggs: Yeah, I think the distinction there is the history of maths versus the maths of history, and I don't really know what the distinction actually is, and I suspect that there's not much of a distinction. I've been one of those people that says there's... that everything is, has maths at the root of it.

There's always maths there, and I know that can get quite annoying and is sometimes unhelpful, but I do think there's a truth in it. And part of that is if you go back to the very earliest mathematical objects they are considerably earlier than the first examples of, say, writing. And maths has been part of human history since the very beginning, and it's not been, for the vast majority of it, it's not been, like, special people locked away in rooms with bits of chalk and blackboards doing it in isolation.

It's been a part of everything. I think, there's a lot of people who can get a little bit sniffy about things like astrology, but actually astrology and mathematics at certain points in history were ... You couldn't separate them. They have driven the development of each other.

Like really, some really famous names in mathematical history like Kepler, for example. He did what he did, and he described the motions of the planets in the heavens. He figured that out because he was driven by becoming a better astrologer. That was the whole point. Yeah. And I think that, that mathematics is entangled rather than entirely separate from sort of the cultural roots of many different civilisations as well.

One of the things that I'm really interested in is that a lot of people have this view of mathematics as a bunch of facts and statements that were discovered by Greek men and then handed down throughout history academic man to where they reside now with white blokes sitting in leather wingback chairs at Oxford or Cambridge.

And actually, I think it doesn't take much in terms of delving into the history of mathematics to find that vision is completely untrue, and it's actually, maths has popped up in all sorts of cultures and traditions around the world at different times, and they're all discovering slightly different things at different times, and then it starts to come together.

But it's not this sort of collection of esoteric facts written down by named Greek individuals and then passed down to Oxford dons. It's just, it's hard to get that view of mathematics, but a lot of people have it anyway, and I think the missing link there is understanding a bit more of its history and how it came to be.

Katie Steckles: Yeah, 'cause I, I guess you can't really develop a culture in any sense without having that come along with it, if you're developing trade and agriculture and engineering and commerce and all of these things, like it's a necessary tool that you have in order to do those things.

And I guess any culture that starts from, basic hunter-gatherer or whatever, survival, and then evolves into something that is a society, I guess is gonna need, a mathematical framework to do that. So it makes sense that it isn't just the thing that is done in rooms with the word maths on the door, right?

It's the thing that, that happens everywhere all the time, and people use it, and people need it, and even if they don't call it that. I think it's one of the reasons why it's so hard to spot math in the real world a lot of the time is because it's so deeply embedded. I think there's a lot of people that interpret that difficulty in seeing the maths as, as meaning that it isn't really there, and we're trying to retrofit it in a way.

Tom Briggs: But I think it's the opposite problem, where "everything is mathematics" is so deeply rooted in everything we do, that it's easy to go, "Yeah that's not maths, that's such and such." 

Katie Steckles: So if you're working with, say, a museum or some kind of place that you're going in to do this, what's the process?

Like, how do you start getting people to try and find this maths hidden in things? 

Tom Briggs: I originally started off by thinking I can go into a museum and just look around and go, "That's maths. That's maths. This is maths. That's maths. Everything's maths. There's a little bit of maths there. I can see it, sort of the shadow behind the curtain of maths, little maths droppings in the corner."

And things like that. And then I realized that actually I can find the maths that's really close to the surface, but that means that I'm looking in a very shallow way at the, the museum stories. So I'm seeing just the surface level stuff. Whereas if I go into a museum and I can work with the people who work in the museum, who almost by definition are less maths confident because we have the kind of society where you either go into history or you go into mathematics at the moment, they're very much sort of separated, and the people that are interested in both are a little bit more rare these days. So I can if I can go into a museum and help the museum folk understand a bit more about their own relationship with mathematics and consider their own relationship with mathematics, which includes what mathematics is.

This, what ideas people have about what mathematics is which tend to be a little bit restricted. It's all about numbers and counting and doing calculations in your head really quickly for a lot of people and it doesn't go much beyond that. And if we can have a discussion where we gently assess our own relationships with mathematics and think about what it actually is and why it might not be as scary as we initially think it is, then I can help them to Look for the telltale signs that maths is near. And because they've got such a deeper understanding of their stories, they're going to be looking in more interesting parts of their stories for, to see those strands of mathematics that are sticking out, those little wires that are coming off and things like that.

And find a thread to pull on, and then I can help them pull on that thread. And that's how I like to do things is not me going and finding maths and then them doing the history, but I go in and help them to understand how to find maths, and then they find maths in the really deep and interesting parts of their story.

And I think helps to move away from the sort of classic museum maths activity, which is a thinly-veiled excuse to practice multiplication. We can move into actually, no here's some really deep maths, or not necessarily deep maths, but maths buried deep. 

Katie Steckles: Yeah, just here's a standard maths worksheet but with a picture of this exhibit at the top.

Yeah, I guess it's the kind of thing you would get because people are like, "Oh, we want to include some more, broader maths or STEM in our interactions with our guests, but actually we don't really know enough to do that." So you're giving them, you're empowering them, to do that in a way that's much more meaningful and authentic.

Tom Briggs: That's the idea. And I feel that if I can help, if I can work with museums in that way rather than coming and just giving them something to plaster over the top of whatever they're doing, if I can help them understand mathematics and develop their own attitudes and relationships with mathematics, then I can leave behind maybe a couple more ambassadors for the cause. 

Katie Steckles: I guess if they are hesitant about it, that will definitely come across in the way they're approaching people and the way they're communicating. 

Tom Briggs: Yes. This is something that I've experienced in museums a lot is even where the museums have already decided to do something mathematical, I sit in on an activity, and there will be a point where the person delivering the activity will say something like, "Oh, I've never been any good at maths."

And it's a defence mechanism. They've got that anxiety about mathematics. But it also works as well as a lowest common denominator, "Hey, we've got something in common here. I don't like maths, and neither do you, so we can get on, and we can be: we've got this in common." And I think a lot of people say things like that as they're almost preempting getting something wrong, and they want to justify getting something wrong rather than just realising that getting something wrong is all part of the process, and it doesn't matter.

If you get something wrong mathematically, then great. You're gonna learn something, and you'll learn more than, than if you didn't get it wrong. But I think a lot of people have that fear of maths, which means that they can get things wrong in a context that they're interested in and they will deal with it fine, and it's all part of the process.

But you get something wrong in maths, they expect to have a board rubber thrown at them or something like that. And it's, it's all about improving those relationships, I think, but it requires sensitivity because it's such an anxiety-inducing thing in a lot of people. 

Katie Steckles: Yeah. So I guess as, as well as that kind of building of confidence and building of kind of mathematical capability within the team that works at the museum, what kind of other outputs do you see from this?

Do they produce resources? Do they put new exhibits in or change the signage? Or how does it manifest? 

Tom Briggs: Most of the work that I do is with learning programs at the moment. I haven't done a lot more broadly in museums, like with the public-facing stuff. That seems to be the learning teams, the educators seem to be the ones that are a bit more open to change on this front.

Katie Steckles: So this is the team within the museum that run kind of educational sessions for visitors or for schools? 

Tom Briggs: Yes. So they tend to be in charge of school visits, and then in the holidays they pivot to doing family stuff. Basically anything involving children, that tends to be the idea from management, I think, is that the learning team deal with the stuff that involves kids.

They do more than that, but as an overview, and I've done some interesting things. They don't tend to be You can't see them as a person visiting a museum, which is unfortunate because they're behind a paywall for the paid schools visits. But I have done a few things for Maths Week.

I've done a lot of work for Maths Week Scotland, actually. They tend to have a training thing every year in, in readiness for Maths Week Scotland. And the training is specifically for museums. And a couple of years they've had a bit more funding available, so they've said, "You can help us with the training, but also we've got a bit of funding for, for museums to apply for, and they can have a bit of consultation time with you."

And I've done different projects on that, really quite small ones. And there was a really nice project, short project that I did for the castle just outside Edinburgh that Napier's family owned. I did an activity for them which was a sort of cut out and make your own Napier's bones with some instructions in there and the idea being that they were gonna use it on a family activity and that they, we're to spread the word of what Napier did and the links with mathematics at this site and everything, and they were really interested in that.

And I created this activity and handed it over to them, and they said, "Great, thanks. Lovely. Brilliant." And that was a few... It's probably about three or four years ago now. Last year, I was doing something else for Math Week Scotland and I thought, "If this activity, this resource has fizzled out and they're not using it anymore, then maybe I can rejuvenate that, but I don't wanna do it if they're still using it"

So I got in touch and said, "Would you mind if I used this for something else?" And they said, "Oh, actually, we bring it out for all our family days, so we'd rather you didn't 'cause we want to keep ownership of that." And I had no idea that was going on because it was a behind closed doors sort of thing.

But it was really nice to feel that actually they'd grasped that maths activity and run with it, and they were still doing it. So I thought that was lovely. 

Katie Steckles: Yeah. It's really fantastic to see the legacy of something like this as well, that it's not just that you've given them something and they've gone, "Yeah, sure, that's great," and used it a few times.

It's actually become embedded in the way that they're talking to their visitors and yeah they're really showing off, this, this aspect of maths that you found in there. 

Tom Briggs: Yeah. To the extent that they didn't want me to use it somewhere else because it's theirs. And I thought, yeah, lovely. That's really nice to hear, and sometimes you can leave things behind and not hear what happens, especially when they're locked away in a paid-for learning program. Other things that I've run across as well, things that I didn't necessarily have a say in, but it's nice to hear about maths things that people are doing.

I spoke to St. Paul's Cathedral. Some of the learning team there were involved in sort of a multi-museum online maths and museums training thing that I did, again, shortly after the, the COVID lockdowns. And a little while after that, I took some teachers, a small group of teachers down to London to go to the Tate Modern Gallery for something.

But after that we dropped in at St. Paul's Cathedral and had a chat with them, and they mentioned that they'd been doing a family activity based on this quote from Sir Christopher Wren, which was something along the lines of the job of an architect being to render the dimensions of a dachshund dog in bricks and mortar, which he, which is lovely.

Apparently, he thought that the dachshund dog was the perfect ratio of length height- Wow ... in everything. And everything, buildings should evoke the dachshund. 

Katie Steckles: Yeah. 

Tom Briggs: And what they do, they came up with this really simple activity. They got some sort of stuffed toy dachshund dogs, and they give one to a family group and say, "Go around St. Paul's Cathedral and find things that are in the same sort of ratio." And I thought, "That's just such a lovely math. It's so simple." It's a beautiful maths activity. Really nice. And I ran into one of them at a history conference I went to a few weeks ago, and they had a stand. And they had one of these cuddly toy dachshunds on the stand, so they're still doing that.

There's these lovely little maths activities, but it's one of those things where how many people realize it's a maths activity when they're doing it? How many of those families go, "Oh, this is maths"? So that's... I think that's one of the things that I do as well, is try and encourage people to use more mathematical language in, in order that people can connect it up with their experience of mathematics. Most of which comes from classroom. 

Katie Steckles: Yeah, I guess if it's familiar and it's using some of the words that you've seen in school, even if no one's actually saying, "This is maths," it it cements that is just a thing that you can do outside of the classroom as well. 

Tom Briggs: Yeah. You're more, more likely to make that connection and realize that it is maths, and, "Oh, hang on. We're not in a classroom and we're doing maths. Wow." 

Katie Steckles: Fantastic. I think it's absolutely wonderful the stuff you're doing, and I really look forward to the day when I can walk into any museum, and immediately be faced with something interesting and mathematical at every turn.

Tom Briggs: Oh, that'd be great, wouldn't it?

Katie Steckles: It would be absolutely fantastic. But thank you so much for talking to us, Tom. We can put links to Tom's website and anything else that you want us to let people know about, and if there is anything else you wanted to add. 

Tom Briggs: One quick plug for the History and Maths in Education Network, which is something that I've set up with a research partner after a project that, that we did.

The idea of it is to bring together people who are interested in maths and people are interested in history, and where those people are interested in mixing the two together to enrich teaching in both. It is, at the moment, it's a discussion email list that people can join, and we want people to connect with each other and share good practice and share their interest in both subjects.

It would be nice to have a few more people there. So that's the History and Maths in Education Network, and that link can go in the show notes as well. 

Katie Steckles: And your book, obviously. We want people to read that. It's a maths history book, 

Tom Briggs: Yes, please. 

Katie Steckles: Yeah, so we'll put all of that information there, but otherwise, thank you very much.

Tom Briggs: Brilliant. Thank you.

Katie Steckles: That was Tom Briggs, and you may hear more from Tom in a future episode of this podcast. Up next on the Talking Maths in Public podcast, King's College London runs regular afterschool maths sessions for sixth formers called The King's Factor. We spoke to Nada, who's a PhD student there, and helps to run the sessions, to find out what's involved.

So I'm talking to Nada, who is a PhD student at King's College London to tell us about an outreach project that's happening there. So firstly, hello, Nada. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? 

Nada Baessa: Yeah, hello. My name is Nada Baessa, and I'm currently a PhD student in computational number theory at King's College London.

So I enjoy doing maths outreach. I'm involved in a few programs, many with sixth form students and one of them is The King's Factor. 

Katie Steckles: Yeah, so this is what we're here to talk about today, so can you tell us a bit about The King's Factor. What is it? Who is it for? And that sort of thing.

Nada Baessa: Yeah. So it's an after-school program for sixth formers. We run them as two-hour sessions every fortnight, and the main goal is to work on some fun, challenging, problem-solving exercises so that students are exposed to things that are outside the curriculum, but also have big overlaps with what they're already learning at school.

So it's an extension task, essentially. We make it very collaborative and whiteboard-based, so a lot of the time kids will come in, and they won't have met anybody in the group yet, but they'll see a couple of people standing at a whiteboard and join them, and it's very interactive in that sense.

Katie Steckles: Fantastic. I love a whiteboard. It's one of the best kind of things to, the sort of feeling of something that is a way of writing stuff down, but it's not permanent. It's it's that temporary feel of, I can write anything. Even if it's not right, it's okay. I can just rub it out if I need to. 

Nada Baessa: Yeah. And it makes it easier to collaborate- ... because everyone can see what's going on. If you're just writing on a piece of paper, it almost feels like you can't see what the other person's working on. So whiteboards break that. 

Katie Steckles: Yeah, fantastic. And it's fun to have a big chunky pen as well.

I guess. Yeah. And so you're working through problems with them, I guess giving them things to work on during the sessions. Do you have any examples of the kind of things that you've done with them? 

Nada Baessa: Yeah, so the majority of the exercises that we do are essentially university entrance exam problems, so things like the MAT and STEP.

But we start off with warm-up exercises that get them to think about the theme of that particular week. So for instance, if the theme is going to be about differentiation, then we're going to make sure in the first few exercises they're able to differentiate polynomials and understand what it means to find the tangent.

And then the exercises get more and more challenging, and we also have a kind of extension sheet for those who whiz through the entire thing in less than the allotted time, and we give them some more challenging problems again, all from university entrance exams. So STEP is particularly useful for this because it's an increasing difficulty, and there are some questions that are much more challenging than others.

Katie Steckles: Yeah. Fantastic. And I guess having that sort of making sure everyone's got the basic stuff they need first I guess just allows people to not feel out of their depth in, in this sort of thing. 

Nada Baessa: Absolutely. And because some of these problems are supposed to be very challenging, they are hard to get started with sometimes.

So if I'm not thinking about, for instance, derivatives, then I might not realize, oh, this is what this question is asking me to do. But if five minutes ago I was working on derivative, it's at the front of my mind and I'm like maybe that technique is useful. So it's almost a way of easing them in and showing them the techniques that they're going to need for the upcoming exercises.

Katie Steckles: Yeah. So are these students that potentially might need to take the STEP exam, and it's good preparation for that? 

Nada Baessa: So we've got a good mixture. So our only criteria is that you enjoy doing maths. Some of these students are going to be planning to do maths at university, and so potentially needing these exams.

Some of them won't be. Many of them aren't doing further maths, some of them are. So we've got a good range. And the aim really is to just have some fun with maths. It's not a training program. It's not aimed towards getting them to be good at these things, but just to have fun with some more challenging problems.

Katie Steckles: Yeah. And I feel like a lot of the time preparation for this sort of thing, so I guess for the context for anyone who's not familiar, the step exam is a kind of pre-university exam that certain universities require students to pass before they can come to those universities. 

A lot of people get really focused on that as a kind of, "Oh, I absolutely have to be able to do this stuff." But it's really nice to use that in a sort of fun context as well. This is just a nice bit of challenge. 

Nada Baessa: Exactly. And a lot of what we do is essentially giving students an opportunity to interact with some mathematicians, some undergrads, some PhD students.

So I'm a PhD student, but also I work with tutors who are from the undergrads, and students really like asking them questions. "What's university like? What's King's like? And what does it mean to do a maths degree?" So that's a really big part of it. Once they relax and after a couple of weeks you realize, oh, they actually want to find out about what we do, and I get to talk about my research for a little bit.

Katie Steckles: Yeah. That's wonderful. And I think, yeah, a lot of the time it's really hard to get into that and find out the answers to those questions unless you actually go and meet someone who works at university. So it's a nice way to bring people into that as well. Fantastic. So I guess you're a PhD student. Are you part of a team that runs these? 

Nada Baessa: Yeah. So we've got two lecturers who are in charge of setting everything up, and then they essentially assign us, the PhD students, responsibility for running the sessions. And then we've also got some undergrad tutors that we can work with, and they help us manage the numbers because it can be quite a big group, sometimes up to 30 people in a room. So it's nice to have more hands available. 

Katie Steckles: Yeah. Yeah. I guess more hands and brains in the room to be able to answer questions, yeah. And so I guess if you're using existing sort of step paper questions and things, but you've also got these other preparatory questions, are they the same ones you use every year or do you develop any?

Nada Baessa: Yeah. So there's kind of a feedback process. So some years we've noticed, for instance, that students haven't covered certain things at school. So when you start talking to them about these topics, they freeze up. So we, okay, we introduce them a little bit later. Sometimes we realize that it's too challenging or it's too easy, and so we tweak things a little bit, but the skeleton is the same.

Yeah, so essentially start with the warmup, have some exercises from the university entrance exams, and then have a second problem set for that week, which is essentially just harder problems in the same theme. 

Katie Steckles: Yeah, and what kind of response do you get from the students? 'Cause I imagine that they're all kind of pro maths the fact that they're in there in the first place, but do they give you feedback about what their experiences are?

Nada Baessa: Absolutely, yeah. So they really enjoy the sessions. They keep coming week on week, and so that's our biggest sign that they're having fun and they're enjoying them. Many of them end up changing their minds about what they want to do in the future or at least solidifying. So lots of them are going on to study maths at university.

Many of them aren't, and they've just realized, actually, A-level maths is fun, and I don't have to go on and do maths at university just to enjoy it. I can just work with the things that I've got and have fun. Yeah, we've also got students who like to go a bit off topic, so sometimes there'll be techniques that they haven't seen yet that can be used to solve the problems, and they'll ask us to teach them.

And so we might change the structure of the session a little bit and adapt based on what the students want. So there are instances where we'll introduce something new. Maybe they haven't seen the product rule yet. Let's talk about the product rule. Maybe there are certain techniques that would make this problem a lot easier. Shall we talk about them? So they take the lead, and we try to be flexible and make them as engaged as possible. That's really the aim. 

Katie Steckles: That's fantastic, and I guess, having people like you who are there and just have this knowledge and have experience of doing all of this stuff, I guess it's the level below where you currently are or maybe a couple levels below, but it's still difficult, right? Maths is maths. 

Nada Baessa: Absolutely, yeah, and sometimes we get asked really obscure questions. I had a student once who kept bringing really ugly integrals and asking me to do them on the spot, and I just couldn't most of the time. 

Katie Steckles: And I imagine it's useful for them to see that, right?

To see that this is not just something that as soon as you are whatever the meaning of a mathematician is, that you're suddenly just able to pick up anything and do it immediately, that actually this stuff is challenging, and that you've gotta work through it. That's really useful, yeah.

Nada Baessa: Absolutely, and we really try to demonstrate that. So whilst we prepare as much as possible, I like sometimes to not look at a certain question and come to the sessions and just talk through the students, talk through the the process of how do I go from what do I know, what do I need to know, what comes in between, what can I try?

So sometimes they'll see us thinking and getting stuck, and it becomes more of a collaborative process. Rather than me telling you what to do, actually we're working on this problem together. 

Katie Steckles: Yeah, and that's such a wonderful thing to model, 'cause it, it's so easy for people to get this impression that maths is just about having this ability to do it, and it's really a lot more about just working, working on something until you get there.

Nada Baessa: Exactly. Yeah. It shows that resilience is really what gets you through, and the answer isn't always obvious. It's not about being intelligent. It's about being patient and thinking about problems in the right way. 

Katie Steckles: Yeah. Fantastic. It's great for me to hear that is the kind of message that the students are getting from this project as well, that they might be going into it thinking, "Oh, I'm going to the, the extra hard maths thing that you get to do some extra maths that you wouldn't normally do at school," but actually they're developing a lot of those skills and a lot of those techniques through doing this.

Nada Baessa: Absolutely, and those, I think, are more important skills than being able to do a really difficult integral. 

Katie Steckles: Yeah. Fantastic. And one more and very important question is, what do you get out of doing this? Is this something you enjoy? 

Nada Baessa: Absolutely, yeah. I love this age in particular because they are almost adults, and they they are at that stage where they're exploring what they're interested in, and they aren't 100% sure on what they want to do next, but their questions are also really interesting.

They ask things that you wouldn't think of. Are all integrals integrable? They ask questions that are really big questions. But to them, they just expect a nice simple answer, and I think it's... when you spend so much of your time doing math, sometimes you lose that. You lose the curiosity, and they've still got it, so I think that's beautiful.

But also, I love talking about my own research, and that comes up quite a lot, so I enjoy showing students what maths research really is about. A lot of them don't realize that maths research exists and don't really understand what it means to answer questions about unknown things in maths. So making it more real and tangible and showing them, "This is what we do, and this is how we do it".

Because at that age, I didn't know what maths research was about, and if someone had come to me and told me, "Look, this is what we do," I would have loved it. 

Katie Steckles: Yeah. And it's also nice for them to meet the people that are doing that and see, "Oh, actually these aren't, some kind of, you know, terrifying super mathematicians that are levels and levels above me. These are just regular people who are doing the same thing that I'm doing, and this is just their job now." And that, that's really cool. Yeah. 

Nada Baessa: Yeah. It's that making it real, making it tangible, and it's not some unknown thing in the clouds. It's right in front of you. And we really enjoy it when students start asking questions and wanting to know more about areas of maths that they would never be exposed to otherwise.

Katie Steckles: That's absolutely wonderful, and we'll put some information about the King's Factor and the project in the links under the podcast. But I think that's been a really nice introduction to the idea, and I really hope that the sessions carry on and they go very well. So thank you very much for talking to us.

Nada Baessa: Thank you for having me, Katie.

Katie Steckles: Thanks again to Nada for sharing her experience. To finish off this episode, we chatted to Emma Coutts, who runs the Campbell Maths Gym at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. At many universities, students studying degrees in subjects other than maths find it helpful to be able to pop into a maths support center with their questions, and I asked Emma to share with us how this unique form of maths communication presents its own kind of challenges.

Okay. So I'm talking to Emma Coutts, who's joining us from Edinburgh, is it Heriot-Watt University? And Emma is part of a project called the Maths Gym. So first of all, Emma, please tell us about yourself. 

Emma Coutts: Yeah. So I'm, yeah, Emma Coutts, as Katie has said, and I am the director of, it's the Campbell Maths Gym to give us our full title, which is the maths and stats support service at Heriot-Watt University.

So I started my life as a theoretical physicist and mathematician in my undergraduate, and found my way into maths support through a love of teaching. 

Katie Steckles: Excellent. So I guess maths support is this kind of auxiliary support for students, not necessarily even students studying maths, like university students who use maths as part of what they're doing.

Emma Coutts: Absolutely. So it's a kind of catch-all term for any, extracurricular maths and stats help that students wish to seek out while they're at university, and it doesn't matter what they're studying, as you said, 'cause maths and stats pop up in lots of different areas. If they want to boost their confidence, boost their grades they can come along and get extra help from us no matter what discipline they're studying.

Katie Steckles: Fantastic. And that sounds like quite a big challenge, right? 'Cause someone could just come in with a question about anything, right? Anything that's related to maths or stats. 

Emma Coutts: Absolutely, and that's what I love about my job. Kinda keeps me on my toes. I don't quite know what's coming through the door. But we're not there to provide an answer as such.

We're there to help the students develop their study skills surrounding maths and stats and apply it to their context. So we spend a lot of time working with them, looking through their notes, worked examples that they might have seen from their mainstream classes, and figuring out a way for them to understand and then apply those tools.

But it can be a little daunting when you come across someone who's coming from a completely different area. But as an applied mathematician, I think I can turn my hand to most things. 

Katie Steckles: Yeah. And it's all the same maths underneath, right? Theoretically. That's it.  

Emma Coutts: Yeah ... maths is maths.

It just has a different application and occasionally different symbols, but that's about it. And we're ... I'm lucky to have a really great team of other staff members, but also PhD students who are really keen to help in this space as well. So we have quite a sort of base of expertise if you put us all together.

Katie Steckles: Fantastic. So is the Maths Gym just the name for your maths support center, or is it different to maths support in other universities? 

Emma Coutts: No it's the name given here. I guess our only difference is that we're cross campus, as Heriot-Watt has five campuses three in Scotland, one in Dubai, one in Malaysia, as well as other distance learning partners, and I am responsible for providing maths support to all of those students, along with the rest of the team.

Katie Steckles: That's incredible. That must be a huge amount to manage kind of all of that going on at once. 

Emma Coutts: Yeah, it's the time zones that are the problem, when you've got to the manage the different different time zones. But I think so far so good. We're doing a good job and seeing hopefully some, some successful students along the way.

Katie Steckles: Yeah. So in practice, is this a physical place that people come to drop in, or do you do online sessions or a mixture? 

Emma Coutts: A real mixture. Just apart from our specific situation in the Maths Gym in that we're cross campus people have different situations at home, so they might not be able to come to campus or they might have caring responsibilities that means they can't fit into the regular 9:00 to 5:00.

So we run physical spaces on the three biggest campuses that we have that have drop-in sessions. People can just pop along and ask a quick question, or they can sit there and study knowing that the tutors are available. But we also run online sessions that they can book one-to-ones with tutors.

There's small workshops. There's online self-help materials that they can access and so on. So we try our best to provide a range of support resources so that we can help as many students as possible. That sounds like a great approach. Obviously, this is a huge, difficult job because as you say, it could be students who don't necessarily have a background in maths but are just required to do maths as part of their degree.

Katie Steckles: So do you often find there are people who are, really hesitant with maths or perhaps even anxious about it? 

Emma Coutts: Absolutely. So it very much depends on, like you said, their background and which subject they're coming from. And we try our very best to tailor the experience to each student to their goals, so some of them really do just wanna get the maths over and done with if it's not their main focus, whereas others, they maybe are mathematicians or physicists who use a lot of mathematics but are trying to boost their grades. They wanna get an A, or they want to really understand a concept, not just a sort of surface approach.

So we try our best to fit to what the student wants. And we certainly do come across some that have had a bad experience with maths in the past. I think most people who work in mathematics have heard that from students or people just, in general chat, "Oh, I had a terrible maths teacher," or, you know "I was never good at maths," which I don't believe. I think everybody can be good at maths in the right context. But yes, we certainly have lots of different challenges to deal with the different students. 

Katie Steckles: Brilliant. And do you have a library of examples that you can work through with them, or do you get the students to bring stuff from their own course mostly?

Emma Coutts: So we have both. We try to focus on the examples they have from their course just to ensure that we're totally aligned with all the mainstream teaching at the university, that we're not confusing them inadvertently by introducing different notation, for example, which is easy to do when you're looking at different disciplines.

Like you say, the maths underlying it's the same, but the notation and the terminology might be slightly different. So we do try to focus on their own materials. But we do also have a bunch of foundational topics that we have a lot of worked examples so that if they just need that kind of practice, that rote learning, that sort of reinforcement of foundational topics, then they can go over and over those questions again.

Katie Steckles: Cool. That's brilliant. So you mentioned you sometimes have PhD students helping to deliver the support. Is that something that they get a lot out of? 

Emma Coutts: For sure. We have two camps. There are some people that try it and don't like it for exactly the reasons we talked about earlier, not quite knowing what's gonna come through the door.

You can't prepare for the sessions because of that. But I'd say they're few and far between. Most people really relish the chance to get stuck into different types of maths from what they're doing in their PhD research. And I personally think it's a really great sort of training ground for PhD students who are looking maybe to an academic career, looking to teach at university to see not only the students that are turning up and keen in their tutorial groups, but ones that are maybe a little more hesitant and working on different topics as well.

Katie Steckles: Excellent. Fantastic. Is there anything else you wanna tell us about the project? 

Emma Coutts: Just that we I guess we're privileged to be able to do what we do and get to see maths in such different areas to help really build the students' confidence. That's what it's about more than anything.

We found that most of the problems that come through the door are not actually anything to do with ability or knowledge. It's just a sort of lack of confidence in in applying that. So we try very much to work with on that aspect of things, and we work with all the other support services at the university and all the academic departments to try and ensure that we're as aligned as possible to the rest of the university to give the students a well-rounded experience.

Katie Steckles: I think it's such a brilliant name for it as well 'cause it's this idea of that you're exercising the muscles of mathematics, right? It's, a lot of people think about improvement in maths and compare it to things like football. If you just practice running up and down the pitch you'll find it quite boring, and it's when you actually get to play a game of football how it all fits together.

But actually, a lot of the support that students need in this context will be that kind of almost training, just practicing and getting to grips with the basics of it. 

Emma Coutts: Yeah, absolutely. And actually we have when I very first started which was right before the pandemic, I started a couple weeks before before everything shut down.

I had a student draw me a little logo, and it's called Carl, and it's a little brain working out. He's got like a he's lifting his his weights that have got mathematical symbols around him. So yeah. We try and lean into that a little bit. It sometimes leads to a bit of confusion where people are like, "Oh, I didn't know what it was exactly."

Even though, they don't read past the name, even though we've got the description and so on. But I like the name too. Yeah. That's the point of this, is that not all of maths can be exploring new worlds or new territory. A lot of it is just about making sure that you've got those kind of solid foundations, and I guess that's the service you're providing.

Yeah, absolutely. And you need those before you can do anything new and exciting and explorative. You need the foundational materials. 

Katie Steckles: That sounds like an absolutely wonderful project. It's a big challenge, right? It is quite a big thing to just be able to adapt immediately to whatever you've got coming in.

But that sounds like a wonderful thing that's happening, and I'm really pleased to have had a chance to chat to you about it, so thank you very much. 

Emma Coutts: Yeah, no, thank you very much.

Katie Steckles: 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 out more about the TMIP network. Tune into the next episode for more maths comm stories.

Hannah Fry: 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 Lee Deig on Pixabay