Post-grad to Prep 'Mostly Maths'

As part of our new ‘Post-grad to Prep Mostly Maths’ programme, Embley’s Prep pupils have been learning about ‘deterministic chaos’ and why weather forecasts are so bad. This is part of a series of workshops that are designed to confound expectations, ignite curiosity, channel investigation inspire a love of maths with a bit of philosophy, art and science mixed in!
While the finer details of Brownian motion, Julia and Mandelbrot sets and chaos theory are well beyond graduate Maths level, the broad philosophy and questioning of such mathematical concept are well within the grasp of any inquiring mind of Embley’s Year 5 and 6 children.

The Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 used a computer with 32K RAM and a CPU speed of 2MHz. A desktop PC is literally billions of times more powerful and thousands of times faster. The Met Office has access to computers that are orders of magnitude more powerful than this. So, although everyone jokes about it, why aren’t our weather forecasts more accurate? The world has moved on since the 1970s. So much of it is now technologically ephemeral, intangible and impenetrable. But, despite this, we want the children to be curious. And we want them to have their curiosity channelled so that these sorts of questions aren’t impenetrable.

This series is led by the Senior School & Sixth Form Maths Department and in future sessions, pupils will be looking at Non-Euclidean geometry, combinations and permutations, and then fractals and non-integer dimensions.