The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai held its Open Day on 24th August 2024, where school students listened to talks about maths and science, participated in demonstrations, played fun games and took back popular science books to read. We also had visitors from the general public across all age groups who rekindled their curiosity for science through simple but delightful experiments. The activities, hosted by researchers, staff and faculty at IMSc, were spread across themes in maths, physics, computer science and biology.
Photo: Bharti, Shri Hari Gopalakrishna spoke about the evidence of dark matter from the discrepancies in the rotation curves of galaxies, and the different methods being used to detect dark matter.
Photo: Siva, IMSc Media, “If you go by what is shining, you will miss a lot of mass.”
Photo: Bharti, Sunil Kumar Pasupulati spoke about prime numbers, theorems and conjectures related to them and their applications.
Photo: Siva, IMSc Media, “The fundamental theorem of arithmetic says that every natural number can be written as a product of primes.”
Photo: Bharti, Roni Saiba spoke about the protein folding problem, where a single protein sequence can fold into a complex three-dimensional structure.
Photo: Siva, IMSc Media, “It is like taking a single thread, which self-assembles into intricate embroidery.”
Photo: Bharti, Rahul Gupta spoke about how different curves intersect with each other.
Photo: Siva, IMSc Media, This is given by the Bézout's theorem, where the equations describing shapes hold clues to the number of possible points at which they can cross each other.
Photo: Bharti, Sushmita Gupta spoke about how game theory deals with various ‘games’ that we come across in everyday life.
Photo: Siva, IMSc Media, “We can mathematically analyze games to understand the origin of a problem, anticipate situations and provide solutions.”
Photo: Bharti, Izhar Ashraf spoke about the challenges of studying history and the use of robust computational methods to ensure reproducibility.
Photo: Siva, IMSc Media, He went through the steps of mathematically analyzing known languages to determine the direction in which the Indus script was written.
Photo: Bharti, Manika Gupta spoke about the union-closed family of sets conjecture.
Photo: Siva, IMSc Media, Manika spoke about the various efforts to prove this open problem in mathematics.
Photo: Bharti, Sitabhra Sinha spoke about the game of snakes and ladders as a Markov process, where a system shifts from one state to another between time-steps.
Photo: Siva, IMSc Media, “You can model how something changes, a game, or the weather, or life, as a system where you go from one state to another simply as a sequence of chance events.”
