Another New Year, another resolution to write more blog posts. We'll see.
A mathematician delivering the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures is always something special. Hannah Fry's three lectures this year were rather different from Christopher Zeeman's classics. Rather than one person directly talking to the audience for the full hour each time, she brought in guests for short interviews, showed activities outside the lecture room, and presented a huge range of activities and apparatus with volunteers from the audience (and in one case, a plant, when the audience member asked to solve Rubik's cube turned out to be the nation's champion speedcuber). This was a team effort and everyone who took part performed splendidly: Matt Parker's many contributions deserve special mention.
And it was wonderful. The excitement was palpable. The enthusiasm of the audience, the rush to put hands up whenever a volunteer was wanted - even allowing for possibly selective editing, it was clear that all the students were having a whale of a time. Did one ever expect to see young people so excited by a maths lecture? (Sure, Zeeman was also exciting, but in a very different way.)
I have seen some comments to the effect that there wasn't very much maths in the lectures. I think that is misguided. There was plenty of maths, with the applications shown but without the technical details. I don't have any problem with that. As a kid I was always motivated by the abstract mathematics rather than the applications, but I'm in a minority. And today, a kid wanting to know the details of anything Hannah talked about can just get out their phone. And what a wonderful panorama Hannah presented of the power of mathematics in today's world of data and machine intelligence. (It was nice to see MENACE, the match-box game player, taking its rightful place in the show!)
(The one unfortunate thing was that the first lecture included an upbeat segment about using maths to judge when it was safe to explore volcanoes - although it must have been filmed before the tragedy in New Zealand which could not have been foreseen, that bit should have been edited out or reshot for the broadcast.)
So - Hannah Fry's lectures have inspired schoolkids to take maths seriously. Hopefully some of them will be motivated to study maths at University. And what will happen when they attend their first lecture? If these Christmas Lectures are their first experience of mathematics lectures, they will be expecting wildly interactive sessions with guest speakers introduced every few minutes, lots of demonstrations and fast-moving material. How will they react to a lecturer spending an hour going through a complex pure mathematical proof line by line?
Have the Royal Institution misled their audience by presenting as a lecture something so far removed from a traditional lecture? Possibly, but the Christmas Lectures is their brand, so they cannot be blamed for doing that.
If we as university lecturers are to avoid disappointing our future students, perhaps we need to rethink our lectures. Rather than go through detailed mathematics at a pace which cannot be right for everyone in the room, perhaps we should try to emulate Hannah's RI Lectures. We could (as I'm sure some already do) present many voices (on video if not live), lots of ideas, and as much interactivity as we can manage to keep the audience enthusiastic, leaving the technical details for students to study in their own time. We can provide lecture notes (or, better, screencasts) that they can go through at their own pace, pausing when their brain is full and returning to them later, and going to Youtube or similar when they get stuck, just as we ourselves study from books and papers. We can use our large-class time to build enthusiasm and give the big picture rather than getting lost in detail.
If Hannah's "lectures" help speed up the move to more useful use of students' time than the traditional lecture, that will be another benefit from these remarkable Christmas Lectures.
(As always, I am presenting my own personal views - that is what a blog is for! I don't expect everyone to agree with me.)
