The seventeenth 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 investigates the Weierstrass Function, which is uniformly continuous but nowhere differentiable.

Ashley looks at the mathematical properties of origami – including an ingenious way to fold a piece of paper.

Pranati provides several solutions to a question that arose when eating pizza for dinner.

Josha introduces the Goodstein Sequences and provides a proof they will always converge to zero.

This essay shows the link between Pythagoras’ Theorem and Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Yingche discusses a range of methods for numerical integration.

Hamish investigates how humans intuitively understand numbers.

This essay tries to make sense of the concept of ‘infinity’.

Adelyn introduces the logarithm and explores some of its basic properties.

This essay describes some of the maths that is used in climate modelling.

Harini looks at recent developments in pancreatic cancer prognosis.

This essay applies mathematical techniques to stock prices.