The third annual Maseno math camp ran in the third week of August; it’s a bit hard to believe that we’re up to three already!

The week started with a great talk from Rejoyce Gavhi, a South African mathematician who just finished a postdoc in Canada, and who is now starting a new job with AIMS:Sec.  She talked about the challenges she overcame in pursuing mathematics as a woman from Africa, and was quite inspirational for everyone involved.

As usual, we divided this year’s camp up into five ‘themes.’  The themes this year were programming, modelling, geometry, combinatorics, and code-breaking.  I mainly helped put together the combinatorics section with Ingrid Mostert (from AIMS:Sec) and Santiago Borio, a Geogebra virtuoso who teaches school in London; the sessions were about the bijection between subsets and lattice paths, and seeing the binomial coefficients from different perspectives.  Chris Clarke put together some great sessions in the modelling section (for example, using massively multi-player dice-games to model the spread of a disease in a population).  The programming section focused on building flow charts to describe algorithms, which was a pretty different tack than we’d previously considered, and I think a good one.  I never really think of flow charts when I program, but breaking a process down into some ‘decision points’ and considering all possible outcomes is quite useful as a programmer.  Approaching the process via flow charts is a great way to organize that process in a visual way.

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