Some mathematical activities and investigations for the classroom or the lecture theatre can appear rather contrived. This cannot, however, be levelled at the idea given here, since it is based on a perfectly sensible question concerning distributional approximations that was posed by an undergraduate student. Out of this simple question, and…

It is the case that some activities claiming to reside under the STEM umbrella do not, in fact, give participants the opportunity to engage in anything other than routine mathematics. With this in mind, we explore here the potential for developing and then delivering STEM activities based on the discipline of mathematical epidemiology. We argue…

We consider here the plethora of mathematical ideas arising from something as apparently banal as an association logo. This example is used to illustrate the fact that a potentially rich task may also have the capacity to appeal, in a powerful way, to learners' aesthetic sensibilities. It is to be hoped that both teachers and lecturers will find…

In this article, we use a particular example to illustrate a thematic approach to the teaching and learning of mathematics. Our theme, suitable for undergraduates and able sixth-form students, is the enumeration of mathematical objects associated with the prime factorizations of integers. It is shown in detail how this gives rise to some beautiful…

In this article we consider, via a specific modelling example, the educational benefits to be gained from running mathematical activities with our sixth-form and undergraduate students that, in modern parlance, might be termed "rich tasks". The idea for this modelling activity arose while the author was reading a popular-science book on cosmology…