SUMS Meeting: Reid -- Paradoxes and Dodgy Concepts

Hello everyone,

It’s been a while since we have had a SUMS talk. However we have not been 
completely dormant, there was that SUMS Relay which was a great success 
(especially for the team of high school students who won the event!).

This week we have a talk by our Vice President, on Paradoxes and Dodgy 
Concepts. You may think this will be similar to the very first SUMS talk of 
the year, but you would be mistaken. This talk will be a little more 
controversial I think. The abstract:

I’ll be talking about a bunch of randomly chosen and comparitively
controversial (or at least, commonly misunderstood) concepts in
mathematics and science, such as the theory of relativity, the axiom
of choice, the un-uncountability of the real numbers, etc. I’m no
expert in these areas but I’ll at least do enough research so that I
can explain the basics. The focus will then be on what I find
interesting about them (or why I disagree with the majority). The
intention is more to start up discussions and challenge existing ways
of approaching problems than to simply present some facts and
anecdotes (although they’ll also be included). So, it’s basically an
opportunity for me to whinge about the things I don’t understand and
get told off by the much intelligenter audience.

Title: Paradoxes and Dodgy Concepts
Speaker: Christopher Reid
Location: Carslaw 452
Date/Time: Friday October 24, 1-2pm

I hope to see you there.

Also, I would like to mention that we will be having our Inaugural General 
Meeting next week, on Wednesday October 29. I will post more details on 
Friday this week.

Gareth