2025’s Talking Maths in Public (TMiP) conference was hosted by the University of Warwick. The pre-conference Wednesday night social (including a performance by the Pseudorandom Ensemble) and the conference sessions on Thursday and Friday took place on-campus, but as is customary, the Saturday morning networking activities headed into the local area. The Coventry Transport Museum hosted this final leg of proceedings.
A couple of weeks before the conference, I was contacted by the organising committee to see if I’d be up for running a Maths in Museums activity as one option amongst a handful, all aiming at facilitating networking between maths communicators who were winding down and gearing up for their journeys home.
Of course I said “yes”!
I was really pleased by the number of people who decided to take part in my activity, and I’ll be writing it up for the Aperiodical (I’ll add the link here when I’ve done it) and feeding back to the CTM, but in the meantime here’s a quick rundown of the activity.
After a brief introduction to explain who I was, what I do, and why I care about Maths in Museums, I set my bunch of plucky MathsComm-folk a challenge:
Explore the museum! But keep your maths hat on as you go.
When I’m working with museum folk I usually include some ideas for how to spot the tell-tale signs of mathematical threads poking out of exhibitions and objects (museums usually do an excellent job of hiding them, and I’m trying to get them to stop), but this time – with a team of maths communicators on the case – I just wound them up and let them go.
It was, to my mind, a resounding success. I bounced around the museum in my usual museum-exploring style (like a pinball) and heard all sorts of conversations going on. When we gathered together, after an hour or so of exploration, we shared our thoughts, collecting a rich and diverse range of ideas across a variety topics and themes. With our individual interests and experiences we all came up with things that others hadn’t considered. A couple of people told me that keeping their metaphorical maths hat on while they were exploring was something that they – even though they’re proud maths fans – had not considered when visiting museums and art galleries in the past, and that doing so had prompted them to think differently about what they saw.
Professional development for educators of all stripes
I’ve organised and delivered similar professional development activities adapted for various audiences, from maths teachers to museum educators, so if you like the idea of empowering your team to explore maths in museums then get in touch.
If you’d like a taster of the sort of thing we’d do, or to try it yourself, you can find the tips and ideas I provided for our group at TMiP here.
If you’ve kept your maths hat on whilst exploring a museum, gallery or heritage site, I’d love to know what you discovered!