On 1st February, all the UV and LVI mathematicians travelled to Cardiff to listen to three very different, inspiring talks.

Rob Eastaway started the show with his Maths on the back of an envelope, showing us how you could get very reasonable answers by estimating and also a very clever way of calculating the squares of large numbers by using the approach 'the Difference of Two Squares'. Fifi bravely took part in a doubling competition against another member of the audience and won a creme egg for her efforts, whilst Annabel won the prize for guessing the steepest gradient on a road in the UK.

The second talk by Sammie Buzzard showed how she had used Maths to model rising sea levels due to climate change and how her job had taken her to the Arctic and Antarctica. It was interesting to learn how Maths crops up in many different aspects of life. The final talk, by Ben Sparks, called the Sacred Geometry of Chance, was really engaging and amusing. He used probability to explain the likelihood of getting a good hand in Poker and he was also able to win a bet about whether in a group of 50 people, two would share a birthday by considering the probability of this happening.

It was a great day and all the students found it very enjoyable!