Dear all,
The prizegiving ceremony will be held at Bletchley Park on Friday 13th March, and we have tickets to give away. If you would like to bring a group to join the celebrations at the home of British Codebreaking then you can apply online at https://www.cipher.maths.soton.ac.uk/tickets.
The event will last all afternoon, and we have a great lineup for you. Harry Baker, mathematical poet, will be joining us again for the event and I am delighted that Dr Jennifer Rogers has agreed to give her talk
Yeah, But Is It Significant?
You've just tossed a coin ten times and eight of them were heads. Aston Villa win their next five games of the Premiership season. In clinical trials for a new treatment for chronic headaches, 40% get better within 24 hours. But so what, sometimes these things happen just by chance, right? As a statistician, it is Jen's job to decide whether any differences she sees in data are likely to be just by chance, or whether they are 'statistically significant'. But how much evidence do you need before you can say that what you see is significant and how do you untangle causality from chance?
Jennifer studied Mathematics with Statistics at Lancaster University before going to the University of Warwick to do her PhD. She is now a lecturer in Medical Statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and also works at the Medical Research Council Clinical Trials Unit at UCL. She has appeared as an expert statistician in the TV programmes Long Live Britain and Mystery Map - in which she calculated the chance of dying from spontaneous human combustion!
That's it for another year folks! After 8 gruelling rounds the competition, has finally come to a close and we are in the process of adding up the points and contacting potential winners of the challenge. We shall make an announcement fairly soon about the four prize winners:
GCHQ Prize of £1000 for the best individual entry
Winton Capital Management Prize of £1000 for the best team entry
Trinity College Cambridge Prize of £750 for the individual runner-up
IBM prize of £750 for the team runner-up.
We hope you have enjoyed the competition and hope to see you all again next year!
Remember that our prizegiving ceremony, sponsored by BCS - the Chartered Institue for IT, will take place at Bletchley Park on Friday 13th March and there are a few spare tickets available which will be allocated by lottery. Tickets are always in high demand and so we recommend you apply for them early.
Each of the following 8 teams will win a cheque for £25. We will be in touch by email to the address you gave us when registering, so do please check it and get back to us promptly so we can process your award.
Harry
Winners of the Part 8A Prizes:
Solstice Wilson-Garner, Elia De Matteis, Nick Appleton, Sam Mytton, Bartholomew Scattergood from Ralph Allen
Matthew Frey, Alice Aplin from Teignmouth Community School
Pavan Tanna, Blythe White, Viraj Kakhandki, Viraj Kakhandki, Lavnik Balyan, Ethan Martin, Pip Jackson, Yu from The Perse Upper School
Claire Purslow, Juliet Purslow, Maddy Rose-Key from King Edward VII
Alice from King Edward's School Bath
Niamh, chloe, Mafalda from Spalding High School
Archie Licudi from Magdalen College School
Mrs Baker, Joram Claridge plus 5 others from St Gregory's Catholic Primary
Each of the following 8 teams will win a cheque for £25. We will be in touch by email to the address you gave us when registering, so do please check it and get back to us promptly so we can process your award.
To everyone else, there is always next week. Good luck,
Harry
Winners of the Part 7A Prizes:
Robert March from Gordano School
Scott Heiron, Haydn Evans, Louis Dutoitcook, Jack Moxham, Chris Scott from Teignmouth Community School
Jules Desai, Raghav Aggarwal from King Edward's School Edgbaston
A team who wish to remain anonymous from Western Primary School
Joe Baguley, Sam Clowes, Max Peake from George Spencer Academy
Matt, Martin, Katja, Daniel Robbins, Stuart Smith plus 1 other from Riddlesdown Collegiate
Luke Jackson, Harry Westwood, Oliver Moon, Jack Davis from Sir Thomas Rich's
Tom Harvey from Fen Ditton C.P. school
Register online September 2014
The Game begins 2nd October