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!