British Science Festival, Swansea, 6-9 September 2016 Gwyl Wyddoniaeth Prydain, Abertawe, 6-9 Medi 2016

摘要

The British Science Festival has evolved out of the annual meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science which began in 1831. The modern Festival runs over four afternoons and evenings in early September, with well over a hundred lectures, discussions and other timed events, and this is followed by a Family Weekend of shows and workshops. This year's Festival, hosted by Swansea University and supported by Siemens, was blessed with a very compact campus, making it easy to move between events, beautiful weather (not a given in south Wales) and large and enthusiastic audiences for all the events which I attended. Here I shall concentrate on the five events particularly associated with mathematical sciences, though mathematics, often in the form of data handling, entered strongly into many others - there were even some explanatory graphs in a highly entertaining talk Why we laugh.