Winchester Science Festival: Fallacies of Probability and Risk

 

Norman Fenton at the Winchester Science Festival

I had the privilege of being an invited speaker today at this weekend's annual Winchester Science Festival, presenting a talk on "Fallacies of Probability and Risk" (the slides of which can be downloaed from here).

It's the first time I have spoken at one of these big 'popular science' events and I  was very impressed by it. There were people of all different age groups attending both the talks and the various activities in the reception area and the audience was really enthusiastic and responsive.

Norman Fenton during his talk

Judging by the other talk I managed to attend before mine (coincidentally by a former Queen Mary student Marcus Chown** with the same title as his latest book) and the event I attended last night (see below) - it was clear that this festival was a high quality, well organised event.

Festival of the Spoken Nerd: Matt Parker of QM in the centre

I arrived in time last night for a performance of the Festival of the Spoken Nerd. This amazing show consists of three scientists/entertainers: stand-up mathematician Matt Parker (who happens to be Maths Outreach Coordinator at Queen Mary),  experiments maestro Steve Mould and geek songstress/physicist Helen Arney. They manage to provide 90 minutes of quality humour and mathematics education at the same time. They were actually previewing their new show which they will performing at the Edinburgh Festival and on a UK tour. I strongly recommend you go to it.

**Marcus's website is here.