Earth Day Flash Talks!

On the 22nd of April, the UCD Earth Institute held its annual Earth Day flash talk event, a fun filled evening of two-minute talks across many research disciplines. This year, I decided to try my hand at presenting my work to a general audience.

The audience was not full of people interested in maths, so I planned my two minutes with two main objectives:

1. Have zero equations and explain the maths in terms of simple ingredients.
2. Fill my slides with animated graphs to keep everyone interested.

You can see one example of my animated graphs below:

To conclude the talk after some examples of results from my PhD work, I also showed a fun video of a honeybee swimming (yes, they can swim) from this paper. It links to my research but it was just to catch attention.

All I could do was hope that my talk had shown the audience some fun things and they liked it even though maths can be boring for some people. By the end of the talks, there were three prizes: overall, most creative slides, and the audience vote.

To my surprise, in the audience vote, my presentation started to gain some votes! A rival appeared on the charts. It was none other than my fellow fluids group PhD Julius Busse, who had a very entertaining talk. For the first time ever, there was a draw with both of us winning!! It is satisfying to try and translate maths to a wider audience and having people actually like it.

It was a very fun evening and I would highly recommend it (there were also free drinks). Maybe next time you should give a flash talk a try, it is a great challenge and very rewarding. Hopefully my two central goals can help.