Mathematics in Education and Industry Conference 2009

Mathematics in Education and Industry

Date:Monday 29 June 2009 - Wednesday 1 July 2009

Venue: The University of Hertfordshire

This year’s MEI conference will again be held at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield. For a change we are holding it from Monday to Wednesday, allowing us to put together a particularly full programme.

The conference will open on June 29th with a plenary session devoted to current issues and national developments and there will be opportunities to discuss these throughout, including those at GCSE.

Much of the conference will be devoted to workshops, three each day, with up to nine options in each.

These cover a wide variety of topics, ensuring that there is always something for everyone. In addition there will be several guest lectures.

When Lindsey Matthews was at school, he took MEI Mathematics and Further Mathematics A Levels. He is now a senior member of UBS and his lecture will provide a really interesting insight into how mathematics is used in the financial sector.

Neil Sheldon will be known to many delegates through his work with the numerical analysis strand, including setting the Numerical Methods paper. Neil is also a powerful statistician and during the last year has been the Guy Lecturer for the Royal Statistical Society. The aim of this lecture is to publicise good use of statistics; its title is “Statistics and Stories”.

The third guest lecturer will be Jeremy Gray, who is a Professor of the History of Mathematics at the Open University. He will be speaking about the mathematics of planetary astronomy.

This summer marks the completion of the second full academic year of the More Maths Grads programme; a three year project funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England to develop, trial and evaluate means of increasing the number of students studying mathematics and encouraging participation from groups of learners who have not traditionally been well represented in higher education. This conference will feature the work that More Maths Grads have done to date including a sharing and disseminating of their careers and teaching resources. Led by their National Project Manager, Makhan Singh, the project team will give a plenary presentation and there will be an exhibition stand and
workshops as well as a Maths Expo which will showcase best practice work from recently qualified mathematics teachers.

Teachers and lecturers involved in the Further Mathematics Network and the Teaching Further Mathematics (TFM) course will be joining the conference for separate programmes of sessions. For those who would like to know more about these initiatives, the conference provides a good opportunity to talk to those
involved. In addition, on the Wednesday, the Royal Statistical Society will be holding their half-day conference, integrated with the MEI programme and you will be welcome to go to their sessions which will look at using real statistics in the classroom.

We very much hope that you will treat this year’s MEI Conference as an opportunity both for your own professional development and to meet new ideas to share with your colleagues. Based on feedback from last year’s conference, there will be a number of sessions to give you teaching ideas that will bring extra
sparkle to your teaching.