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Sunday afternoon, warm and shiny, was the perfect setting for the last day of MATBaires 09, the maths Festival held in different areas of Centro Cultural Recoleta since last Thursday. The Festival offered a comprehensive programme of popular science, entertainment and everyday use of mathematics in our lives. By closing time, the number of attendees reached 30 thousand.

The past four days witnessed, in total, 13 conferences, a workshop with 3 speakers, 12 open-air shows and the projection of 3 films, followed by debate-talks, and 4 documentaries. The May Olympiad took place on Saturday, with the participation of 110 students in two levels. Additionally, there were 41 board games with 4 replicas of each one and 15 giantgames on the terrace, offering different levels of difficulty for children and grown-ups. The Permanent Exhibition featured 55 maths related murals, an Art Gallery housing the work by 3 artists, 4 instruments for calculation dating back to the mid-twentieth century and 10 plasmas with multimedia contents specially designed for the Festival.

Last Saturday afternoon, Gabriela Michetti visited the different areas of the Centro Cultural Recoleta where the festival is running in the company of Minister of Culture Hernán Lombardi. There they mingled with the audience, a small crowd of maths lovers and a good number of bystanders, casual visitors of a regular Saturday.

Michetti attended the shows “reTime/kronoscop” and “Fausses Notes & Chutes de Balles” by French artist Adrien Mondot and then had some fun playing the game “Los 100 Barrios Porteños” (the 100 districts of Buenos Aires), consisting of a map of the city where players where supposed to delimit the different districts with coloured counters. Rounding off her perfect Saturday, the official won the game and left with a grin.

“A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper” is the intriguing title of the closing conference of the first edition of MATbaires 09, to be held at 7pm at the Cronopios hall of Centro Cultural Recoleta. The conference will be addressed by American mathematician and populariser John Allen Paulos and presented by film critic Eduardo “Quintín” Antin.

Structured like a newspaper, the conference investigates the mathematical angles of the news. Its title is eponymous with one of the most popular and kudized books by the author, also a professor at the prestigious Temple University in Philadelphia and a columnist for ABC News and British newspaper The Guardian. So popular is the book that it is on the readers’ list of the Random House Modern Library’s compilation of the 100 best nonfiction books of the century.

A classic by Stanley Kubrick, “Dr. Strangelove” will screen today 3pm at the microcine room of the CCR. The film stars Peter Sellers, playing not one but… three roles!: an army captain, the president of the United States and an advisor to the president.

In the context of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union –the film was released in 1964– the film is a satire on the suspicion and paranoia prevailing around the idea of a nuclear war that might bring the world to its demise. Due to the quality of the film and its performances, the film ranks among the 100 best films of the twentieth century, according to the American Film Institute.

The talk-debate “Von Neumann and Nash: the Origins of Game Theory and the Cold War” will be held after the screening by PhD in mathematics Juan Pablo Pinasco, an associate professor at the department of mathematics of the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires and researcher for CONICET.

“Tierra de Mandelbrot”, created and directed by choreographer, dancer and teacher Edgardo Mercado, will be showing again today Sunday 3.30pm at the Villa Villa hall. Tickets are free of charge and can be collected from 3 o’clock at the festival’s meeting point.

The play takes place in a black box completely devoid of extra details, bathed by architectural lighting and a video projection that shapes the space with an abstract design in clean black and white. Three artists, a violinist and two dancers, inhabit this space.

In the director’s words, “there is no narrative in this play, no cause-effect; only three fractal individuals transforming the way we observe, perceive and assess reality within the frame of the complex paradigm, governed by order-disorder, recurrence and autosimilarity”.

Argentinian professor and researcher Alicia Dickenstein will address the conference “Einstein and Mathematics” today, Sunday 2.30pm, at the Cronopios hall of the CCR. She will be reviewing the evolution of the abstract ideas that geometry contributed to the development of the famous theory of relativity left by Einstein to humankind in the twentieth century.

Alicia Dickenstein held the position of director of the department of mathematics of the Faculty of Exact Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires during the 1996-1998 period and is currently a researcher for CONICET. Dickenstein boasts a vast career as a guest professor and public speaker at colleges and universities worldwide and has authored both scientific papers and mathematical textbooks for children aged 9-12.

Today MATbaires 09 will be housing the Buenos Aires segment of the traditional May Olympiad (Competencia Juvenil Iberoamericana de Matemática), organised by the Ibero-American Federation of Mathematics Competitions and the Argentinian Mathematical Olympiad.

The competition, of national scope, will also be running during the weekend in the cities of Bahía Blanca, Córdoba, Rosario, Mar del Plata, Bariloche, Comodoro Rivadavia, Resistencia, Santa Cruz and San Miguel de Tucumán. It is divided into two levels, one for students up to age 13 and the other for those up to age 15, all of whom successful participants of the regional stage of the Argentinian Mathematical Olympiad and the Ñandú Olympiad in 2008. They are supposed to solve five problems in a period of three hours.

Tonight 8pm at the Cronopios hall of the CCR, PhD in mathematics Pablo Amster will be addressing the conference “La Matemática, al Compás del Dos por Cuatro”, on the relationship between maths and tango, the Porteño musical genre par excellence. Amster, an Associate Professor at the Department of Mathematics of the Faculty of Natural and Exact Sciences, researcher for CONICET and populariser of science, works in two dimensions: on the one hand, from his status as a specialist and, on the other, from his ability to reveal the beauty of the mathematical universe to a mass audience. He has published many scientific research papers and collaborated on different projects with local and overseas universities. Additionally, he has addressed conferences and seminars on popular science and written several works aimed at a non-mathematician audience.

The author of “La Matemática como una de las Bellas Artes” and “Fragmentos de un Discurso Matemático”, two of his widely read books around which will revolve the conference, recently said to newspaper Clarín that “mathematics is present in the structure of our thought and in language, it is a central part of us”.

Choreographer, dancer and teacher Edgardo Mercado will be presenting his “Tierra de Mandelbrot” today 6.30pm at the Villa Villa hall of the CCR. The show, created and directed by Mercado, takes place in a black box completely devoid of extra details, bathed by architectural lighting and a video projection that shapes the space with an abstract design in clean black and white. Three artists, a violinist and two dancers, inhabit this space.

In the director’s words, “there is no narrative in this play, no cause-effect; only three fractal individuals transforming the way we observe, perceive and assess reality within the frame of the complex paradigm, governed by order-disorder, recurrence and autosimilarity”. Along with another of his creations, “Plano Difuso”, “Tierra de Mandelbrot” took part in the Lyon Dance Biennial in 2006.

The show can be seen again on Sunday 3.30pm at the same hall. Tickets for both performances are free of charge (subject to capacity) and can be collected half an hour beforehand at the meeting point.

To screen today Friday 6.30pm at the Microcine room of Centro Cultural Recoleta is Ron Howard’s “A Beautiful Mind”, featuring Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly and Ed Harris. Following the screening there will be a debate-talk on the subject.

The film tells the story of maths prodigy John Forbes Nash’s tortured life, dating back to his days at Princeton University, his relationship with his friends and future co-workers, his obsession to develop a brilliant theory and the beginnings of his mental illness, diagnosed years later as schizophrenia.

Based on the eponymous book by Sylvia Nasar, “A Brilliant Mind” garnered numerous awards, including four Oscars: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress in a Supporting Role (Jennifer Connelly), and Best Adapted Screenplay.