News & Updates

We are delighted to welcome Dr Huizhong Appleby-Wu who joins us on the staff of the Mathematics Department. We wish Dr Madeeha Khalid all the very best as she embarks on a period of leave.

Madeeha Khalid's joint research work with Colin Ingalls, Rank two sheaves on K3 surfaces: A special construction, has been accepted for publication in the Quarterly Journal of Mathematics, and is due to appear.

On Friday 16 December, Madeeha Khalid gave a seminar entitled K3 Surfaces and Matrix Algebras at Queen's University Belfast. In her talk, Madeeha described a classical correspondence between quadratic forms and K3 surfaces, before going on to give an explicit presentation of a K3 surface as a moduli space of Azumaya algebras.

A collaborative project in which Sinead Breen is involved with Drs Aisling McCluskey (NUIG), Maria Meehan (UCD), Julie O’Donovan (CIT) and Ann O’Shea (NUIM) was reported on at the BSRLM meeting in Oxford on 19th November. The associated paper Reflection on Practice, in Practice: The Discipline of Noticing has appeared in the proceedings.

Dr Andrei Mustata (UCC) visited St Patrick's College on Tuesday 11th November. Firstly, in a colloquium talk, he gave a short overview of the conjectures which motivated a dramatic development in algebraic geometry and brought to light the deep connections between algebraic geometry and topology. The techniques created for proving these conjectures are now fundamental tools in algebraic geometry. He also presented a research seminar dealing with the construction of quotients of projective varieties by the action of reductive groups.

Maurice O'Reilly was interviewed by Mary Mulvihill of Ingenious Ireland on a free tour commemorating the discovery of quaternions by Sir William Rowan Hamilton on 16th October 1843 at Broombridge in Cabra. He described the key mathematical ideas involved in quaternions and suggested that the quaternion formula, i²=j²=k²=ijk=-1, should be as well-known and cherished by Irish people as the Lake Isle of Inisfree! The tour was published on the web on 10th November.

Our Maths Week activities for 2011 appeared to be very successful. In particular, Dr Javier Aramayona's (NUIG) talk on The Shape of Space and Dr Maurice OReilly's (SPD) The Art of Maths event were both very well received by the large audiences they attracted. Full details of events organised can be found here.

The project entitled ‘The design and use of mathematical tasks to promote conceptual understanding and develop advanced mathematical thinking skills’ proposed by a network comprising Sinéad Breen (St Patrick's College), Ann O’Shea (NUIM), Kirsten Pfeiffer (NUIG) and Barbara Jaworski (Loughborough) was awarded a NAIRTL 2011 research grant. Research has shown that the types of tasks assigned to students affect their learning and the use of tasks with lower levels of cognitive demand can lead to rote-learning and a consequent inability to solve unfamiliar problems or to transfer their (mathematical) knowledge to other areas competently and appropriately. The project funded aims to design a range of tasks to encourage higher level aspects of mathematical thinking (e.g conjecturing, generalising, specialising) in undergraduate students. A variety of means will be employed to evaluate the tasks designed.

MEI 4 Mathematics Teaching Matters, the fourth in a series of biennial conferences on Research in Mathematics Education, was held in St Patrick's College on Thursday 22nd and Friday 23rd September. Keynote presentations by Dr Paul Andrews, University of Cambridge, Dr Therese Dooley, St Patrick's College, Dr Aki Murata, Stanford University and Professor Ron Tzur, University of Colorado were extremely well received by participants. Papers presented at the conference also included those by Sinéad Breen in collaboration with Dr Ann O'Shea (NUIM) on Designing rich sets of tasks for undergraduate calculus courses, and by Maurice O’Reilly, co-authored with Dr Patricia Eaton (Stranmillis) and Elizabeth Oldham (TCD). Looking back to look forward: The mathematical identity of prospective mathematics teachers. Further information on the conference can be found here.

Members of the department presented posters at the Staff-Student Engagement in Education (STage) Conference in DCU on 13th and 14th September. The posters displayed were entitled Design and implementation of mathematical tasks to promote advanced mathematical thinking, which reported on a project undertaken by Sinead Breen in collaboration with Ann O'Shea (NUIM), and Using mathematical identity to gain insight into how students prefer to learn mathematics which reported on a study by Maurice OReilly and his colleague Patricia Eaton (Stranmillis University College).