Dr Vicky Neale, the Whitehead Lecturer of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute and Balliol College at the University of Oxford, came to Francis Holland on Wednesday.

She gave a workshop in the hall to the whole LV year, where the girls threw themselves into some Modular Arithmetic. By the middle of the session the girls were speaking confidently in mathematical language usually reserved for undergraduate students, testing out ideas and proposing hypotheses. After a quick lunch with the mathematics teachers, Dr Neale then moved to the Lecture Theatre where she gave an inspirational talk to 60 sixth form mathematics students from Francis Holland and two other schools (The Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School and St Marylebone). While parts of her talk ventured into second year university degree territory she kept it accessible to all and peppered it with interesting historical vignettes. She clearly loves her subject and our students were left with a positive and helpful view of what studying mathematics could be like at university.

Dr Vicky Neale has an upcoming book, called “Closing the Gap: the quest to understand prime numbers”. It will be published this autumn.

For more information about Vicky Neale and her work please click here

You can also find videos on YouTube of lectures she has given to secondary school and sixth form students including a version of the ‘solving equations’ lecture she gave on Wednesday.