Slow chaos exhibition at Science Pavillion UZH

Since March 2023 the UZH Science Pavillion hosts an exhibition about slow chaos (mostly dealing with mathematical billiards), created by the Science Pavillion team with Corinna Ulcigrai and featuring her research.

Since the start of the exhibition I’ve worked there as a guide. We lead regular free tours for the general public explaining the mathematics of polygonal billiards, from the idea of unfolding to current research.

We also organise longer workshops for school classes, which include problem-solving sessions on topics such as the illumination problem and cutting sequences for billiards in the square. The focus of these sessions is on allowing the students to experiment (using pre-made Geogebra programs) and discover mathematical phenomena on their own.

STIMULUS

In autumn 2019 I volunteered at a primary school, teaching extension maths lessons for a group of six 10 year olds, for an hour once a week. We covered some introductory combinatorics, played around with loci (which we made physically using string and blu-tac!) and cut some Möbius bands.

Here are the handouts I made for them.

Durham Johnston School Maths Society

I organised the school maths society in my last two years of school (2016-2018). This involved making problem sheets for the weekly sessions and discussing the problems with the other students.

The goal was two-fold: firstly to introduce the other students to the (mostly absent from the school curriculum) concept of mathematical proof, and secondly to show some fun areas of maths they might not have seen otherwise.

Here are the problem sheets I made.