The National Mathematics Symposium 2018, themed `Modern World Mathematics', will take place on the 20th of March 2018! 

On March 20th, you will be welcomed at the Natlab with some coffee and tea around 9.30, after which we will all start with the opening lecture given by Bert Zwart. This lecture will be about the mathematical problems which occur in rare events in power grids, such as failures and blackouts. After this lecture the group will be divided over the first two parallel lectures. One of these lectures will be given by Andreas Hülsing and will be about online privacy in a post-quantum world. The other lecture will be given by Jules Kruijswijk about the multi-armed bandit algorithm. This is an adaptation to the one-armed bandit (aka slotmachines), which aims to maximize your profits at these machines. 

After these lectures, it is time to have lunch, during which you will have the possibility to visit the stands of companies to get to know more about them. When we have all eaten enough, you can choose between three workshops; Itility will give you a challenge to solve a problem with a given data set and algorithm, Optiver will play a game that will give you insight how mathematical and analytical skills are practically applied in a trading firm, and TNO will let you work on a current, modern day case, where using mathematical knowledge is the key to solving the problem. When the workshops are finished, there will be time to grab a cup of coffee or tea and a snack, before we will go to the last round of lectures.

First, there will be the second parallel lecture session this time with lectures given by Björn Baumeier and the Belastingdienst. Björn will talk about the challenges of multiscale molecular modeling, and the Belastingdienst will explain the mathematical technics behind money and informationstreams. Note, the talk of the Belastingdienst will be given in Dutch. Following to this parallel session will be the closing lecture, given by Deloitte, which will be about data analytics in machine learning. The day will be concluded with a social drink.

For more in-depth information about the talks and the speakers, you can go to our website http://nws2018.nl/. One note to the subscriptions: some lectures have a limit on the amount of people who can follow it, therefore when asked to fill in the subscription form you can give preferences and the subscription is not definite. However ,we will use the first come first serve principle, thus don’t wait too long with subscribing.