Eleven Pleckgate students from Year 10 attended the annual Florence Nightingale Day at Lancashire University to hear talks by successful women in mathematics and statistics.
The Florence Nightingale Days are part of Lancaster University’s continuing efforts to promote mathematics and statistics to young women in Years 10 and above, who are soon to be making crucial choices in their career paths.
This was an opportunity to see successful women in mathematics at various stages of their careers and witness the significance of mathematics within the modern world.
There were three lectures, the first explaining the achievements of women mathematicians and their contributions to modern mathematics and the lecturer’s own academic journey to becoming a lecturer.
The second lecture was conducted by a PhD student studying maths at Lancaster University and how she combines her love of maths with her love of films, including why some films generate more income at the box office than others.
The final lecture was how maths is used within medicine to identify defective heart beats and help doctors identify patients who otherwise would have been misdiagnosed.
As well as the lectures, pupils from all schools in attendance were given the same set of difficult mathematical problems to solve and Pleckgate’s pupils finished in second place, despite being up against many sixth form pupils. As a prize, pupils were each given a University of Lancaster water bottle.
