The fourteenth group of essays from the 2023 Teddy Rocks Maths Competition. The showcase will take place throughout June and July with the winners being announced at the end.

The competition is organised with St Edmund Hall at the University of Oxford and offers a cash prize plus publication on the university website for the winners. It will be running again in early 2024 so be sure to follow Tom (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) to make sure you don’t miss the announcement!

This essay explains the concept of an outlier and how they can be identified in a data set.

Thomas looks at the maths behind some common misconceptions involving probability.

This essay looks at the role of Game Theory in recent historical events involving conflict.

This essay hypothesizes the existence of a ‘pleasure function’ and what such a thing would look like.

This essay looks at how different coordinate systems can be used to represent transformations of graphs.

Cicely investigates the way humans see colour.

Alice describes some of the properties and applications of the Fibonacci sequence.

This essay introduces the concept of the Fourier Transform.

This essay looks at the history of irrational numbers and their abundance in nature.

This essay explores the concept of synchronisation and how maths can be used to understand many of its phenomena.

Sophie provides a succinct summary of some of the most famous unsolved problems related to the prime numbers.

Mithul investigates how maths is used in financial transactions and how its misuse may have influenced the economy.