The magic of maths on show

On Thursday May 8, Glebelands School were delighted to host the ‘Mathemagician’ Andrew Jeffrey as he gave entertaining, but thought-provoking Mathematics talks to both students and the local community.
The magic of maths at Glebelands School SUS-140514-153024001The magic of maths at Glebelands School SUS-140514-153024001
The magic of maths at Glebelands School SUS-140514-153024001

Andrew was actually a Maths teacher for 20 years, and he is also a professional magician, winning competitions at local and national level. It’s these two passions that he combines in his various presentations, which have entertained and amazed students and local communities up and down the country.

During Thursday afternoon, students from Year groups 7, 8 and 10 joined Andrew as he baffled the students with card tricks, magically turned £20 into $1,000,000, used a magic square to guess a student’s prediction, and demonstrated the magical properties of the pentagon!

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Through all these mind-bending tricks, he also emphasised the importance of Maths in all aspects of life and how key it is to get stuck every once in a while – your brain can’t grow unless you challenge it!

Andrew’s key message during his evening talk was that Maths isn’t at all scary, but actually quite dependable, and he certainly did that as he entertained around 250 members of the local Cranleigh community. He intrigued us with tricks for learning your times tables, amazed us by multiplying huge numbers in his head, did an incredible random matching trick with Harry Potter characters and also performed the famous trick that fooled Einstein!

The evening was a fantastic success, feedback from all those who attended was brilliantly positive and Andrew was certainly kept busy with children clamouring to get his autograph at the end.

If you’re interested in attending similar talks at Glebelands School in the future, please contact us at: [email protected]

Report by Mrs Samantha Patterson, Head of Mathematics. Picture contributed.