ThinkTank Maths https://www.thinktankmaths.com Efficiency and Innovation Wed, 21 Oct 2020 19:10:35 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.6.12 Happy Holidays from ThinkTank Maths 2019 https://www.thinktankmaths.com/2019/12/happy-holidays-from-thinktank-maths-2019/ Thu, 19 Dec 2019 20:08:59 +0000 https://www.thinktankmaths.com/?p=2952 Despite the many, very serious global problems that have attracted much more media coverage that humanity is facing today, such as the blockage of appropriate solutions to global warming by a few major, dominant states, the alarming, rampant pollution of land and oceans by plastics, the growing, manic political drive of nations to compete rather than collaborate…we have chosen again, for the second year running, the theme of ‘space pollution’, given its excessively downplayed nature in spite of the gravity of the problem, and the prospect of massive, unchecked commercial ‘space-grabbing’ strategies and militarisation of space occurring outside of all international regulatory frameworks.

At the present date, there is an official tally of 5,450 successful rocket launches, with a total of approximately 8,950 satellites placed in orbit since 1957; 5,000 satellites are still in space, of which 3,050 are not functioning (lost or drifting). Moreover, due to satellite collisions (officially 500 reported to date) and deliberate destruction by their owners, the amount of uncontrolled space debris in orbit around Earth is constantly increasing; 22,300 objects are seen and tracked according to ESA (19,779 according to NASA, 26,000 according to the ASTRIA Project), but an estimated 3,400 objects bigger than 10 cm still cannot be tracked, as well as 900,000 objects between 1cm and 10cm, and 128 million objects between 1mm and 1cm (Space debris by the numbers).

Every year satellites, rockets and even the International Space Station (ISS) are forced to perform collision avoidance manoeuvres. In 2018 ESA alone reported 28 such manoeuvres to avoid satellites and debris clouds.

Rules of the Game

The space agency you work for has successfully placed a satellite in orbit. The work is not over yet, however, as the risk of collision with space debris and other satellites still remains.

You have been given the task of keeping the satellite safe from collisions, from the control room on Earth. To help you, several sensors on the satellite monitor the surrounding space to detect approaching debris using radar, LIDAR and other techniques, and their readings are displayed in various representations on the 8 small screens at the right side of the control screen. To help you, the controller, the pictures on the top of the screen give an idea of what a clean reading will look like.

When a collision is imminent, the debris will cause disturbance in some of the readings on screens on the right, and a red vertical progress bar will appear on the screen to show you how much time you have left. The longer the vertical bar is, the closer the collision will be. Before you run out of time, you will have to find and click on the 4 cleanest readings that represent a safe new direction to be taken to avoid a collision. Based on your decision, the satellite will then adjust itself to a new orbit. But be careful; if you select the wrong readings, or if you wait too long, the satellite will be destroyed.

The aim of the game is to keep playing and avoid as many collisions as you can; indeed in real life the threat of a new possible collision is always present for satellites and space stations in orbit. Good Luck!!

Click the button “Avoid debris” to start the game.

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ConocoPhillips and ThinkTank Maths sign agreement for the second phase of Ekofisk R&D project https://www.thinktankmaths.com/2019/01/conocophillips-and-thinktank-maths-enter-new-rd-agreement/ Fri, 18 Jan 2019 17:16:36 +0000 https://www.thinktankmaths.com/?p=2890 ThinkTank Maths ConocoPhillips


ConocoPhillips Skandinavia AS and ThinkTank Maths Limited have entered into a new R&D agreement to continue the development of an innovative, ‘augmented intelligence’ geo-steering decision-support software, which aims to support drilling operations in the Ekofisk field on the Norwegian continental shelf.

Ekofisk Field


Background:

ThinkTank Maths Limited is an established and recognised provider of innovative operational solutions based on its unique mathematical research and data analysis capabilities in several high-performance Engineering sectors; aeronautics, defence, space, transport and oil and gas.

ConocoPhillips Skandinavia AS carries out exploration and production of oil and gas on the Norwegian Continental Shelf. ConocoPhillips Skandinavia AS is both an operator and a licensee in several producing fields on the Norwegian Shelf.


References

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Happy Holidays from ThinkTank Maths 2018 https://www.thinktankmaths.com/2018/12/happy-holidays-from-thinktank-maths-2018/ Tue, 18 Dec 2018 16:20:47 +0000 https://www.thinktankmaths.com/?p=2875 This year’s ThinkTank Maths Christmas Card is about the problem of Space Debris in orbit around the Earth, in view of the new UK Space Object Catalogue initiative.

With space becoming more and more easily accessible over the last 3 or 4 decades, the number of objects in orbit, including uncontrolled objects like defunct satellites and debris from launch vehicles and collisions, has increased at an alarming rate. Today it is estimated that in orbit around the Earth are over 20,000 pieces of debris larger than an apple, over 500,000 larger than a pea and over 100,000,000 fragments smaller than 1 cm.

Travelling in excess of 28,000 kilometres per hour (that’s 8km/sec), even the smallest piece of debris can cause very serious damage to spacecraft, space installations, and is ultimately a lethal danger for astronauts working outside a space station. As an illustration, at this speed an object of 1cm has the same destructive effect as a grenade, and a 1 mm flake of paint creates an impact equivalent to that of a 1.5 kg pétanque boule thrown at a speed of 100 km/h.

With currently no efficient way of removing debris the situation continues only to get worse; debris orbiting around the Earth for years – even for several hundreds of years for the highest orbits - are going to fragment and multiply as they incessantly inter-collide with each other (the ‘Kessler Effect’), rendering space potentially unusable as we lock ourselves inside a debris belt of our own creation.

Identification and long term tracking of space objects is essential to help future space traffic policies and avoid collisions with functioning structures in space (satellites, space station, …).

Unfortunately, current technology and data analysis techniques can only reliably identify and track objects above 10cm in size, ( only 0.02% of dangerous debris ), highlighting also the crucial need for scientific advancement in this domain.

Your pre-Christmas Mission

You have been assigned the perilous task of launching a new satellite into orbit around the Earth. However, as we have seen, this task is complicated by the fact that past irresponsible launch activities have left the target orbits cluttered with uncontrolled satellites and other debris.

You need to read the information (data) provided by the ground-based observatories on your screen to determine when it is safe to launch.

At each of the 2 launch stages you will be presented with 3 simultaneous sets of data from which you will decide the right moment for the launch.

  • For the first stage to activate the launch, click on “Launch to Orbit”
  • For the second stage click on “Launch to Second Orbit”
  • If you chose the wrong moment for either phase of the launch, the craft will be hit by orbital debris and destroyed, creating even more debris !

The game is tailored to your name, so you may also want to enter other names or words to play different versions of the game. You can move your view of the Earth using the mouse.

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Happy Holidays from ThinkTank Maths 2017 https://www.thinktankmaths.com/2017/12/happy-holidays-from-thinktank-maths-2017/ Tue, 19 Dec 2017 15:31:34 +0000 https://www.thinktankmaths.com/?p=2762 Saturn - Image by Kevin Gill. Cassini model by Brian Kumanchik and Christian Lopez (NASA/JPL Caltech)

ThinkTank Maths has chosen this year to celebrate the extraordinary Cassini-Huygens mission to the rings and moons of Saturn and the extremely touching moment of the Cassini orbiter’s planned demise on the 15th September 2017… after more than 27 years of intensive work for some of the scientists who contributed to the project, a journey of 7 years in the immense void of space, covering 2 billion miles and then 10 years of data-gathering in the orbit of Saturn.

However, the achievement does not just lie in the display of these incredibly impressive numbers but, in our opinion, more in the outstanding subtle analysis of the data received back on earth and its dynamic and rapid use to modify and re-direct the mission leading to the discovery of surprising local phenomena totally unexpected in the Solar System by the expert scientific team, such as an ‘Earth-like’ weather system on Saturn’s giant moon Titan but with lakes, seas, clouds and rain of methane rather than water and ‘sand-like’ dunes made of iron-hard plastic, the discovery of seven new moons around Saturn (a new total of 62 moons), an underground ocean of water on one of these moon and gigantic geysers of water vapour and ice feeding Saturn’s rings, to name but a few.

The successful harvest of information from this deep-space mission fills us with delight! It is indeed a very important part of the activity of ThinkTank Maths to seek to extract complex and unexpected information from heterogeneous, non-specific datasets through the development of innovative mathematics in order to understand an environment or a given situation, prevent accidents or equipment failures, or (more routinely) steer the drilling operation of a subsurface wellbore whilst avoiding unknown obstacles.

This year, to try to put you in a similar situation, and thus celebrate the remarkable exploits of the Cassini mission, we invite you to play a little Christmas-themed game where you will have to try to navigate your route using data which (at first) seems to give you no obvious or immediate useful information to guide you to your destination.

Click here to play the game!

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Inspiring Highschool Girls to follow STEM Careers https://www.thinktankmaths.com/2017/07/inspiring-young-women-to-follow-stem-careers/ Fri, 21 Jul 2017 15:33:20 +0000 https://www.thinktankmaths.com/?p=2687 ThinkTank Maths SmartSTEM Display

It is with great enthusiasm that ThinkTank Maths sponsored and participated in its fifth event of this fantastic initiative to inspire the next generation of Mathematicians. Members of our staff and research team engaged once again with the keenly curious and determined would-be, ‘high school scientists’ on our interactive “build-a-graph” stand, and delivered a series of workshops at the various events across Scotland throughout 2017.

ThinkTank Maths Networks Galore Talk

SmartSTEMs exits now for two years and in 2017 is “set to roll out the biggest expansion in it’s short history. Bigger events and more events, our network will reach a record number of young people with a wider network of business leaders, innovators and leading thinkers in the STEM environment”, says the founder, Stuart MacDonald. “The aim of each conference is to reach out to young people and inspire them about STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Maths) careers and help organisations and educators hear about the latest opportunities for young people”.

ThinkTank Maths SmartSTEM Display

The ThinkTank Maths’ team organised a series of fun workshops, such as asking, “What do Graph Theory and chocolate have in common?” The answer being, of course, “Mathematics.” Everyone leaves with their head buzzing about “graph theory”; its origins and modern day usefulness, and has a lot more than just a bar of chocolate to take home and chew over…

For more information on the SmartSTEMs organisation and its 2017 Programme follow this link: SmartSTEM

ThinkTank Maths Chocolate Lecture ThinkTank Maths Wristband

SmartSTEM Logo
]]> Happy Holidays from ThinkTank Maths 2016 https://www.thinktankmaths.com/2016/12/xmas2016/ Wed, 21 Dec 2016 18:05:30 +0000 https://www.thinktankmaths.com/?p=2656 One of the biggest events in the world of Physics this year was the first direct observation of Gravitational Waves, by the LIGO observatory - a truly international scientific collaboration - which comes almost exactly a century after Albert Einstein first predicted their existence.

ThinkTank Maths Limited wants to celebrate this exciting scientific exploit.

Gravitational waves are ripples in the curvature of space-time, caused by the movement of mass in the Universe, which move away from their source at the speed of light. These waves are not blocked by dust or matter (i.e. planets, stars, galaxies..) - unlike electromagnetic waves for example, allowing them to travel huge distances and bring information from very distant events in space and time, such as the beginning of our universe.

However measuring such an effect is a huge technical and theoretical challenge, which explains decades of unsuccessful attempts to do so from around the world until now.

Even though these gravitational waves come from some of the most powerful events in the universe, such as 2 black holes colliding and merging (as observed in February this year), by the time the waves reach Earth they’re so weak that even noise from passing cars near the detectors can easily drown out the signal.

As an illustration, if a gravitational wave were produced by the collision of two black holes (each 30 times the mass of our Sun), a billion light years away, the effect on earth would be a ten thousand times smaller than the width of a proton.

Building large detectors sensitive enough to observe the tiny ripples isn’t sufficient. The signals coming from the detectors look messy and have to pass through several complex mathematical procedures to finally obtain a clear observation of gravitational waves.

In celebration of this amazing human achievement ThinkTank Maths has made a Greetings Card which asks you to find the relevant signal from the space noise pictured in the image below. The fuzzy signal you see in the picture needs to be processed to reveal its meaning.

Entering your name defines the mathematics that needs to be applied to the signal. However, it may take a few different attempts to find the right mathematics to decrypt the signal.

Can you work out the right way to input your name and observe the message sent to you … all the way from Edinburgh?

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Partners In Innovation - ThinkTank Maths and The Scottish Oil Club https://www.thinktankmaths.com/2016/04/scottishoilclub/ Thu, 07 Apr 2016 13:57:24 +0000 https://www.thinktankmaths.com/?p=2639 The Scottish Oil Club to be joined by Chief Executive of ThinkTank Maths

ThinkTank Maths’ Chief Executive, Angela Mathis, has been elected as a board member at the leading national energy discussion and debate forum, The Scottish Oil Club.

The club is a highly connected network of global industry specialists who share their wisdom, vision and experience of the energy sector via regular speaking engagements and presentations. Members of The Scottish Oil Club are world-leading professionals and experts in energy-related fields, including academia, renewable energy, scientific research, engineering and more. The members come together to debate and give informed insights on the political, economic, industrial and technological aspects of petroleum and other energy industries.

In Good Company

Angela is joining prestigious company at The Scottish Oil Club. The club dates back to 1975 when it was first founded as The Edinburgh and Leith Petroleum Club. In 1998, the Glasgow-based Oil Club joined forces with the Edinburgh club to create The Scottish Oil Club. The club is an international endeavour, with membership throughout Scotland, Europe and the rest of the world. The diverse membership of this non-profit energy NGO comes from the energy industry as well as other supporting service corporations and organisations. Current corporate members include Shell, BP, the Scottish Government, Centrica, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh University and many more.

Why ThinkTank Maths?

We invited Angela Mathis to join the board of The Scottish Oil Club because not only is she a passionate and informed member of the oil and gas community in Scotland – and globally too – but through her company, ThinkTank Maths, she also brings extensive knowledge of mathematics, engineering, and scientific research gained working with global advanced engineering industries,” said Rob Schneider, the Executive Secretary of The Scottish Oil Club. “ThinkTank Maths is a unique business within the energy sector and we hope the insight, dynamism and ground-breaking approach ThinkTank Maths brings to the oil and gas industry will inspire our members.

Beyond the Boundaries of Science & Innovation

I am honoured to be asked to join the Board of The Scottish Oil Club. At ThinkTank Maths we believe this nomination acknowledges our innovative vision and our specific contribution to providing paradigm-changing mathematical and scientific solutions to the vital industrial and economic ecosystem of the oil and gas industry.

Part of our mission is to offer a distinctive expertise within the energy sector in Scotland, the UK and beyond, with the view to stimulate new ideas and strategies of The Scottish Oil Club’s member companies, individuals and students who work and study within advanced engineering fields. As a board member of The Scottish Oil Club, we hope to bring new insight and broaden understanding of the global energy sector and where it needs to grow, adapt and transform itself to meet current challenges.” - Angela Mathis, CEO ThinkTank Maths

Perhaps most importantly, this collaboration allows both ThinkTank Maths and the Scottish Oil Club to develop and push the boundaries of science and innovation within the energy sector. Some in the industry are entrenched in dated practices and thinking, meaning new advances in science may not be being put to optimal use within the energy, or oil and gas sectors. Our shared objective within the energy sector is to use forward-thinking, innovative mathematics and scientific research to develop new technologies.

Cutting-edge contributions to the sector include developing new approaches in Geoscience – particularly understanding sub-surface geology and hydrocarbon behaviours in reservoirs, which will improve the development of conventional and unconventional oil and gas extraction.

Out-of-the-box thinking, rigorous observation, relentless innovation: that’s what typifies ThinkTank Maths – making it a worthy member of The Scottish Oil Club.

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Happy Holidays from ThinkTank Maths 2015 https://www.thinktankmaths.com/2015/12/xmas2015/ Mon, 21 Dec 2015 15:52:03 +0000 https://www.thinktankmaths.com/?p=2598 This year marks the bicentenary of the birth of the Victorian mathematician George Boole. Perhaps the best-known of his many achievements is Boolean logic and to celebrate the life and work of George Boole, TTM has created a personalised christmas card for you in the form of a Boolean-inspired set of christmas fairy lights.

Boolean logic is ubiquitous in the modern world. Every electronic circuit, every computer algorithm is based on its mathematical principles. Even though the individual parts are very simple, the overall behaviour of the circuit can be very complex. Boolean logic considers only two values, one and zero, (alternatively, true and false) and builds a versatile framework for how they can be combined. In the image below, a yellow fairy light indicates an output of 0 and a red fairy light indicates an output of 1. The fundamental components of the circuit are operations, which take two input values and combining them to produce an output. The different ways in which this can happen correspond to the shapes of the fairy lights.

Though Boolean logic has been the foundation of modern computing there are limitations and shortcomings. ThinkTank Maths presents an extension of a Boolean logic circuit, allowing for a variety of values other than 0 and 1 (colours in the picture). The fairy light animation depicts the flow of information through the circuit for the many random inputs.

  

Your name determines the structure (i.e. the connections) of the circuit and the shape of each light. You must find the correct format for your name if you want to see a christmas-tree shape (although the others you may also find exciting…).

Season’s greetings and a happy new year from everyone at ThinkTank Maths!

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Happy Holidays from ThinkTank Maths 2014 https://www.thinktankmaths.com/2014/12/xmas2014/ Wed, 17 Dec 2014 10:31:04 +0000 https://www.thinktankmaths.com/?p=2471 This year in the world of mathematics the proof of the Kepler Conjecture was finally completed and to celebrate this achievement, ThinkTank Maths has created a personalised Christmas card for you.

Imagine you had to pack several spheres as efficiently as possible. You would probably choose to arrange them in the most obvious way by stacking them in a pyramid shape, where each set of four spheres is arranged in a little tetrahedron. This arrangement is known as the face centred cubic packing and is what most greengrocers usually do to stack oranges. But how can you be sure that this is the most efficient possible arrangement?

The Kepler Conjecture claimed that this was indeed the optimal way to pack spheres and was first stated by Johannes Kepler in 1611. However, the mathematical proof turned out to be extraordinarily difficult and it was only this year that Thomas Hales and Samuel Ferguson of the University of Pittsburgh finally confirmed it.

The proof makes use of geometric structures known as Voronoi diagrams - scroll down further for more.

  

Imagine scattering a few small objects of differing colours on a piece of paper, and then colouring each point on the paper to be the same colour as the closest object. The resulting pattern, once you have taken the objects away, is called a Voronoi diagram.

Voronoi diagrams turn out to be extremely useful in many branches of mathematics and science - not only for packing problems, as mentioned above, but also domains such as fluid dynamics, machine learning and cell biology.

In the image above your name defines the number and location of the points and the geometric structure of the space, from which a Voronoi diagram is generated. Obviously different names will generate different distributions of points and structures, so try also entering the names of your family and friends to see the other kinds of patterns that can be produced!

Click the link on the picture to generate a printable image, which you could print out for some eye-catching festive wrapping paper or even an eclectic piece of modern art for your wall.

(There are more options below the image for generating different formats - including the option to set the size or get a greyscale version.)

Season’s greetings and a happy new year from everyone at ThinkTank Maths!

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Happy Holidays from ThinkTank Maths - 2013 https://www.thinktankmaths.com/2013/12/xmas13/ Tue, 17 Dec 2013 15:34:06 +0000 https://www.thinktankmaths.com/?p=2000 On the 4th July 2012, researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva announced that the Higgs boson particle had been discovered. This particle had been theorised to exist over 40 years earlier and for their work on this theory, the “Higgs Mechanism”, Peter Higgs and François Englert were awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.

For a long time, one of the biggest mysteries in particle physics was where the masses of the fundamental particles come from. The “Higgs mechanism” describes the origin of the masses of these particles and also predicts the existence of a new particle, the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson is a fundamental particle of the universe which means that, like electrons, photons (particles of light) and quarks (which make up protons and neutrons), it is not composed of other particles. Particles can interact with each other or decay to produce other particles and it is the goal of the LHC to provoke such interactions in order to discover new particles, notably the mysterious Higgs boson.

However, the extremely short life-time of the Higgs boson makes its detection very difficult. It has been only by analysing the extremely complex end products of these collisions, and only after many many repetitions that physicists have been able to determine whether a Higgs boson has been created: so many trillions of particle collisions had to be done and meticulously analysed taking years of work in order to be confident of its discovery.

To celebrate these exciting discoveries, some made at Edinburgh University, ThinkTank Maths has created a personalised Christmas card based on collisions which reveal the Higgs boson. To be precise, the animation below simulates the collision of two bunches of particles inside a particle accelerator like the LHC, which interact and decay into lots of other particles, including a Higgs-like particle (highlighted in yellow in the animation).

Please use Google Chrome if this game does not work in your web browser.

Controls : Holding down the left mouse button and dragging will rotate the image. Holding down the right mouse button and dragging left/right will zoom in/out.

Your name determines the initial number of particles and their underlying interaction laws, including the chances of producing Higgs particles. Because the results are probabilistic, you may have to try your own name four or five times before a Higgs is found. Some names will produce few Higgs particles, others will produce lots, so if your name isn’t producing many then try someone else’s (family, friends, famous scientists). Unsurprisingly, we have skewed the rules in our universe such that entering the name “Peter Higgs” will produce the most optimal result. Happy hunting!

Season’s Greetings and a Happy New Year from everyone at ThinkTank Maths!

Please note that performance will vary according to computer, operating system and browser. An alternative Java version is available here for slower or incompatible systems.

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