Grenoble - France, is a joint facility supported and shared by 19 European countries.
The ESRF operates the most powerful synchrotron radiation source in Europe. Each year several thousand researchers travel to Grenoble where they work in a first-class scientific environment to conduct exciting experiments at the cutting edge of modern science.
At the ESRF, physicists work side by side with chemists and materials scientists. Biologists, medical doctors, meteorologists, geophysicists and archaeologists have become regular users. Industrial applications are also growing, notably in the fields of pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, petrochemicals and microelectronics.
Pupils from ES Culham travelled to Grenoble at the end of March 2010 for the event “MATHS EN JEANS." We were tasked with a number of problem solving exercises.
The trip gave us the unique opportunity to meet and interact with students from other schools also tasked with solving similar problem as us.
During our stay we were able to attend lectures given by researchers from different universities about different real world problems, and how math can be applied to such things such as avalanches, sudokus, gears, evacuation of a room during a fire and many others…
These helped us to explain our solutions in front of the many people in a way that they could understand our posed problems and our processes used the deliver our solutions. Believe me, this was not easy with the kind of problems we had to solve. You’re so familiar with it that it demands a lot of efforts to make it understandable to others.
We also visited Grenoble and ESRF (European Synchrotron Radio Facility), which is a particle accelerator which generates X rays for various experiments in many domains (Medicine, archaeology…)
The math en Jeans trip was a great experience, we learned a lot and this was also great fun.
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