Tag: plastic

YouTube Star ‘Rocks’ Math (Schwetzingen Newspaper)

“30kg of plastic has been found in a blue whale’s stomach: how much would that be if a person swallowed just as much proportional to their own bodyweight?” Tom Crawford from Oxford began his guest lecture at Hebel-Gymnasium with this question. The students calculated that you’d find six (empty) plastic shopping bags in a human stomach. The other results worked out over the course of the entertaining presentation were also very impressive.

Tom Crawford doesn’t just have rock music as a hobby, rather with his tattoos and piercings, he looks like a rockstar too – though his tattoos are all to do with maths: since for example, the decimal places of “e” (Euler’s number) wind around his arm, the number pi is also encoded in an infinite series. On his YouTube channel “Tom rocks maths”, he presents science in an entertaining way – sometimes even pieces of clothing fly off during stripteases: “I want to show that maths isn’t always just super serious but it can also be fun.”

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The mathematics lecturer is currently part of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Heidelberg. This is where the best maths and computer scientists in the world are meeting up with junior researchers and journalists. Crawford came to Schwetzingen at the invitation of maths teacher Birgit Schillinger. He brought along some exciting questions. The common theme was Tom’s favourite number, pi, which is used in so many formulas. How many ping pong balls are needed to lift the sunken Titanic off the ground? Which factors are involved when a footballer bends a ball so that it flies in an arc past the wall into the goal? When calculating the trajectory, several physical variables play a role. But how? Crawford studied the mathematics behind it. His doctoral thesis was on fluid mechanics: What path does a river take when it flows into the sea? The findings help us to understand sea pollution and possibly help to stop it.

At the end, the Hebelians made Platonic solids, of which, amazingly, there are only five. Strange? No, Tom explains this number by the sum of the angles at the corners – all very logical! Finally a student’s question, which example in mathematics has impressed Tom the most: “It is terrific how the wave characteristic of light follows from Maxwell’s equations, which deal with electricity and magnetism, with only the help of mathematics. Maths is just awesome!”

Birgit Schillinger

Thanks to Cameron Bunney for the translation.

The original article in Schwetzingen can be found here.

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Reducing Ocean Pollution using Maths

80% of marine pollution comes from the land via rivers, and so by understanding where river water goes, we can focus our clean-up efforts on the most susceptible areas. Live interview with BBC Radio Oxford.

Come and watch me explain my research in full detail at New Scientist Live on Friday 11th October 2019.

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Using maths to clean-up our oceans

Video of my ‘Teddy Talk’ at the 2019 St Edmund Hall open day.

Rivers are the major source of pollution in the oceans and if we are to clean them up, we first need to know where the majority of the pollution is concentrated. By creating a mathematical model for river outflows – verified by laboratory experiments and fieldwork – the goal is to be able to predict which areas are most susceptible to pollution from rivers and thus coordinate clean-up operations as effectively as possible.

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Nailing Science: The Maths of Rivers

Creating scientifically accurate nail art whilst discussing my research in fluid dynamics with Dr Becky Smethurst and Dr Michaela Livingston-Banks at the University of Oxford.

We recorded 1h30mins of footage, so this is the heavily edited version of our chat ranging from the fluid dynamics equations needed to describe the flow of water in a river, the Coriolis effect, the experimental set up replicating this, and how these experiments can help with the clean up of pollution.

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