MathsJam - a weekend to geek out about cool math stuff | Hacker News Reader

MathsJam - a weekend to geek out about cool math stuff

mathsjam.com

11 pointsColinWright3 comments

A brief explanation is in order here, but I'm no good at "brief." Here's why I've submitted this to HN.

In an earlier submission (by someone else) [1] it was being discussed how the organisers of a particular conference had recalculated the price points and decided to lower the price, appropriately refunding any who had already paid.

People commented on how the price was already pretty low, were impressed with the honesty and transparency, and added that the organisers shouldn't be too reluctant to get recompense for their work.

I'm organising a conference [2], and thought the price comparison would be interesting, but that's pointless without saying what you get. So I gave the price and listed what you get for it [3]. I then added a link in case anyone was interested, but given that it's math, and in the UK, I figured the interest would be low, and didn't think twice.

It got down-voted into oblivion. I was, and still am, stunned, but a couple of people have provided an insight into possible reasons. One said:

    Your post is clearly intended solely
    to generate interest in your event. [4]

Well, that's simply wrong, but if that's how it was perceived, I guess the down-votes were justified.

However, both replies mentioned making a separate submission, and that's this one. I still believe that for this audience the most interesting and relevant thing is the pricing and content, and not the event itself, and hence that the original comment was more appropriate, but maybe I'm wrong.

And so here it is as a separate submission. I watch with interest.

================================

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2804115

[2] http://www.mathsjam.com

[3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2804792

[4] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2805905

If the puzzles on the website are representative of what level the course is aimed at, you can hardly advertise this as a "conference". It would seem more appropriate for interested sixth-formers, which makes it an admirable and worthwhile event, but probably of less interest to the majority of UK HN readers.

The puzzles on the web site are old and not representative, but I've not had time to update them yet. With nearly 50% of the attendance already booked, I've had very little time to go back and address the inadequacies of the original site.

But thanks for the reminder - I need to go and address that. As a stop-gap - here's a list of talk titles from 2010. Not all of these made it - we had 50 x 5 minute talks, and some of these didn't make the cut:

http://www.mathsjam.com/MathsJamTalksOffered_2010.html

But the talks and puzzles were really a starting point. The main purpose was to get people together to talk about what they are interested in. The talks only accounted for 60% of the time, the rest was in coffee breaks where people talked about maths at all levels. We had PhDs talking about their latest difficulties, and industrial mathematicians talking about the applications of the latest results from various areas to their work. We had teachers finding new ways to present concepts, and we had retired people lending their expertise and thoughts to students.

And there were puzzles, demonstrations, magic, and other stuff that geeky people like.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com