Maths Spiral- 30th September 2025

What is a Maths Spiral?

A Maths Spiral is a virtual event for 16-18 year olds who enjoy maths, who are either considering studying maths at university level or are just curious about the subject. Even if you don’t think you want to do it at university, it should be fun for those who enjoy maths.

You are in your last couple of years at school and now is the time to start thinking about your next step: what do you want to do, where do you want to go? It can all seem a little overwhelming and it can sometimes feel like you are making choices based on what you liked at school without any experience of what it might be like at the next level. The aim of these sessions is to give you some idea of what it might be like to do maths in a university setting.

We will look at some maths that you may not have seen before and work through it as a group, seeing how what you already know can help us to find strategies to solve problems - very similar to what we want to do at university and beyond!

We will then have a chat with a recent graduate, asking questions about what they enjoyed in their degree, what they didn’t enjoy and what they actually did in their degrees. We will have some set questions to get the ball rolling but we are very happy for you to ask any questions you might have! We cannot answer in detail about the application process (as it is different today), however we are happy to try and answer any questions about what it is like to do maths at university.

Please abide by our Code of Conduct during the event:

FAQ

Q. What is the schedule?

This will be a 90 minute long session on Zoom. The Zoom link will be emailed out to you via Eventbrite a few days before the event. Please do not share this Zoom link with anyone, but instead direct those interested to this Eventbrite page so that they can book their own place.

5.30 pm-5:40: Introduction

5:40-6:15: Maths!

6:15-45: Chat with a recent graduate

6:45-7 pm: Wrap-up and final questions

Q. Will I need to do any work to prepare for this?

We do not expect you to have done any preparation for the session. We will send out an email a few days before with some resources you can look at before the session, if you would like. This may just allow you to see some new concepts and so come to the session with some idea of what we are talking about but in case you don’t read it, we will introduce these concepts during the session as well.

Q. What maths should I know?

We expect a knowledge of GCSE or NAT 5 maths (or equivalent) but nothing higher. We will be talking about high level concepts that are introduced at A-level and university but will introduce them in such a way that they should be accessible with an understanding of GCSE, Nat 5 (or equivalent) maths.

Q. What universities have your graduates been to?

Although our sessions will include maths that is taught at many universities across the country, we are students from the University of Edinburgh and so the experiences of the recent graduates may be specific to Edinburgh.

Q. Will there be other sessions throughout the year?

We hope (but are unable to garantee) there will be two more sessions over the year 2024/25 on Zoom. We have not confirmed dates but are planning to have one in January/Frbruary and one in May. If you subscribe to our “mailing list” we will keep you updated on the next session.

Q. If I miss one session, can I still go to the next one?

Absolutely! The sessions are not linked to each other in any direct way, so you can come to as many or as few sessions as you would like. The puzzles will be on a different type of maths each time and we will have a different recent graduate each time, so you can come to all three and hopefully learn something new at each session.

PLEASE NOTE:

By registering to the workshop you are giving the University consent to hold and process data about you, under data protection regulations, for the purpose of running this event.

Data about your School and postcode will be used by the School of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh to analyse the demographics of participants, and may be anonimysed and published in the future (appearing in University reports, Education, Mathematics or Science Communication Journals/Conferences, for example). Other data may be stored by the University of Edinburgh for up to five years, and used for the purpose of evaluating the event. The University will not share any personal data with third parties. If you would like your data to be deleted from our datastore, please email francesca.iezzi@ed.ac.uk.

In order to facilitate some of our online bookings for other events, we use Eventbrite - a third party service which is not operated by the University of Edinburgh, Details of Eventbrite's privacy policy can be found at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/support/articles/en_US/Troubleshooting/eventbrite-privacy-policy?lg=en_GB.